FAR Future, Episode 11

Starting with this episode, the “exactly five years from today” setting is going away. The future moves at its own speed, after all.

---

Tuesday, October 30, 2012
October Surprises

Not much of one, really. There are so many foreclosures in the works that even some bankers (anonymously) expressed relief that the Foreclosure Moratorium Act went through. The same goplets tried the throw the same roadblocks as always, but what do they have to lose? They’ve been toast for several years, and in two weeks they’ll be burnt toast.

That talking heads haven’t even said boo about it, which (seeing that it’s Hallowe’en tomorrow) is hardly sporting. I guess they realize that FMA is wildly popular among just about everyone, and talking about it is only going to be a distraction. Thus, they’re still pounding the fraud angle on gas rationing, and claiming selective enforcement when their own get dinged for it. The thing that got me worried, though, was earlier this week when Shotgun Sam was talking to a caller whining about yet another goplet blowout on the way. “Don’t worry about it,” Sam said. “We’ll win either way.” Then he changed the subject.

What was that about?

I don’t think they could pull off election fraud on the scale it would take to shift more than a couple of districts, but a whole state? Enough states to swing the electoral college? Not likely. I wonder if it has anything to do with those “Dixie Shall Rise” stickers I’ve been seeing on road signs and gas pumps lately.

Are the wingies planning an armed coup? Frankly, the thought prompted me to think about taking a couple weeks of vacation up north after the election. But goobers are everywhere, even if they’re not numerous in most places (Planet Georgia being an unfortunate exception). Mrs. Fetched thinks we’ll be better off staying put, since they won’t feel threatened where they’re the majority. Maybe. She also said that even if I’m right, we don’t know when things go pear-shaped — it could be next month, it could be January, or even later.

It could be some kind of secession movement. Some state reprehensible candidates started pushing this “new majority” theme last week. I spent some time trying to figure out what that meant — nobody’s crazy enough to think the goplets will have more than 100 reps in the House next year, or 20 Senators, let alone get a majority. (Except, of course, the delusional dude they have running for Prez that claims he’ll carry 40 states and 67% of the popular vote.) On Planet Georgia, of course, the legislature has been a majority for 10 or 12 years, so there’s nothing “new” about that. Unless (again) they’re plotting an overthrow, secession is the only thing I can think of that would create some kind of new majority — and I don’t think you can let that many people in on a plot to overthrow the government without someone spilling the beans. Of course, if they do try pulling something like that, Shotgun Sam’s little outburst back in late August will get him a lot of unwanted attention — he could be doing his show from a jail cell (which would be kind of fun to listen to).

Secession would bring its own problems, though, and energy would top the list. I doubt that the government would let, say, the Texas/Louisiana oil fields go without a fight. Then there’s the question of electrical supply; the grids might tie us together more tightly than the politics. Families scattered in different places, Internet links, phone links… what a mess it would be.

Wow, talk about a digression. The Foreclosure Moratorium is supposed to give people some breathing room. Home“owners” have to put their houses up for sale to avoid foreclosure, they avoid bankruptcy, and the bank sets the minimum acceptable price (although the loan-holder supposedly gets to negotiate with the bank about that). Some banks have been re-negotiating loan terms to give the buyer enough breathing room to pay the loan — the bank eats some unrealized income that they wouldn’t have gotten, and get a performing loan on the books — but some have refused to change their procedures & would up holding a ton of crumbling houses they can’t unload. Sure, if the economy ever recovers they’ll have a bunch of valuable acreage, but that in itself is a gamble. I think the FMA will push them to start taking a more reasonable line… and keep those banking execs from getting shot at or worse.

continued…

Weekend Cinema (October horror continues!)

Long ago, CATV brought wonders of programming that we didn’t get on the Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo stations — like the South Bend UHF station that ran the “Double Creature Feature” on Saturday nights. The Screaming Skull was one of the scarier movies they showed — so it seemed at the time. Looking at the description, I wasn’t even sure it was the same movie until the first scene… nobody ever got that hokey before or since…

Enjoy! I recommend a fine wine, perhaps Thunderbird or Mad Dog 20/20, to go with this cinematic cheese.

Alienating Customers in Two Easy Steps

The butterfly effect: when I first got interested in blogging, I was a pretty die-hard Yahoo! user, so I went to see if they had anything. They didn’t, I wasn’t able to find any other blogging services at that moment, so I went on to other things. Some months later, I found Blogger, started TFM, and the rest is history — only later did I learn that Yahoo! had opened Yahoo!360 about a month earlier. If I’d looked at Yahoo again, or they had opened 360 up earlier, Tales from FAR Manor would have been a Yahoo blog. As it was, during that rough patch where Blogger was flaking out a lot, I was getting ready to move the whole shebang over to 360 anyway. But then Google fixed the problems and I’m still here… except that I started a work-related blog, under my real name, at 360.

Like most beta software, 360 has had its share of growing pains. Some less than well-executed moves by Yahoo, however, made things worse — for example, after buying Flickr, Yahoo decided to migrate Yahoo Photos to Flickr. The transition did not go well for many people, and (perhaps reflecting the older crowd on 360) the change was not well-received in any case.

Things came to a head in the last month or so. Whenever the 360 team added a new post to the product blog (might only be visible to 360 members, not sure), people raised the same issues: problems with the photo transition, blog-stalkers, disappearing posts or entire blogs, friends being deleted — over and over, and no recognition from the 360 team that the problems were being worked on or that they were even reading the comments. Then the communications pretty much dried up completely after a post on August 10. Rumors started flying, especially after Jerry Yang included 360 in a list of items that were being de-emphasized during the conference call (following 3rd-quarter financial reports).

Looking for any way to get Yahoo to notice the issues on 360, many users took to posting on Yahoo's Mash feedback forum. (Mash is a new social-networking site, owned by Yahoo and apparently targeted to a much younger demographic than the typical 360 user.) The Mash folks responded, at least, even if they deleted 360-related posts, but the volume must have gotten a bit much because Darrell Jones posted something for the first time in two months: Yahoo! 360º Questions? Let’s Talk (Uhhh, Right Here). The title was taken by some to be rather condescending — after all, there had been no communication for two months and the post content still contained no recognition that they were paying attention to the problems people were having… then over 1600 comments, with no response again, infuriated people even more. Darrell’s new nickname became “UHHH.” Some people found Darrell’s 360 blog, which hadn’t been updated since February, and started leaving “Quick Comments.” After a couple days of that, Darrell simply turned off Quick Comments with no other response.

Finally after nearly a week, Matt Warburton (they at least saw that Darrell was toast with the users) posted The Evolution of Yahoo! 360, which (yet again) was short on specifics, only promising “that Yahoo! 360 will transition to a new universal Yahoo! profile that will be closely tied to other relevant services across Yahoo!, and will include improved blogging capabilities.” Many 360 users took this to mean that Mash (which, like Myspace and Facebook, is profile- rather than blog-oriented) would be the new way forward — of the over 900 comments posted so far, many of them boiled down to “If I wanted Myspace, I’d be on Myspace. Just fix the bugs.”

But it may be too late. In the “Evolution” post comments, many are threatening to leave if 360 becomes Mash'ed up, others have said they’re already leaving. It’s probably true: Bloggers Anonymous has reported falling membership due to people leaving 360. According to the comments in the “Evolution” post, many are leaving for Multiply.

It would be a shame to lose 360. There are several nice features that Blogger simply doesn’t have, or exist only as third-party add-ons. First, the “Blast” lets bloggers put a brief banner message (with an optional link) at the top — it’s like an integrated Twitter. Quick Comments, which I mentioned earlier, is a built-in shout-box. And the “friends” and “groups” lists are something we have to do manually here on Blogger. Of course, there are also things that 360 is missing that Blogger has, like drafts and the ability for non-members to leave messages. It will be interesting to see if Google’s Orkut re-launch (coming next month) will add some social-networking aspects to Blogger. I’m sure a lot of 360 users are wondering about it as well.

So Yahoo has shown us how to alienate customers in two easy steps:

1) Let problems languish for months with no action or response.

2) When forced to respond, be condescending and don’t respond further.

Daughter Dearest turns 18 (OMG OMG OMG)

Today was the day… some things you can’t put off. And would you want to even if you could?

We started the morning thus: Mrs. Fetched, Cousin Al, and I went (sort of) quietly upstairs to DD’s room, carrying a Yorkie that Big V wanted us to keep for a week to prevent unscheduled breeding. DD, being pretty smart, knew what was coming and pulled the covers over her head. However, she failed to do anything about the side so that’s where we inserted the Yorkie. The resulting squawk was most satisfying.

For reasons I haven’t quite worked up the nerve to ask about, Mrs. Fetched decided to have a birthday breakfast (at Ryan’s, naturally) and skip church. We had close to two dozen people show up — but I had to leave early because the music director at church had some family over and I’m the #2 person there. Oh well. I missed the presents but I pretty much knew what she got anyway… partly because I helped wrap most of them.

As we were all stuffed from breakfast, we came back to the house and goofed off for a while. DD got out the dance pads and we had a good time watching each other stumble around… except for DD and her cousin Brand X, who are pretty good at it.

And of course, there was cake. Actually, there were two cakes. Mrs. Fetched’s mom brought a present along. DD said, “I hope this is a hair dryer — I really need one.” It was. She was happy.

And after cake, there was a trip to the theater to watch The Gameplan. The Boy and J decided to stay here, so I also decided to stay here just to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. Naturally, they left shortly after and haven’t been seen since (and he hasn’t been where he said they were going, naturally). But with an empty house, I decided to finish scraping the paint off the trim above the garage. I had to lash the scraper to a pole to reach the top, but I got it. (I’ll probably do the same thing for the paint.)

I got out a bottle of homebrew last night, and it’s not quite ready to go yet. It’s sleepy: you have to shake it to wake it up some before opening the bottle. Give it a couple more weeks, I guess. It’s still DD18, for lack of a better name.

Weekend Cinema

Since it’s still October out there, we’re continuing to highlight free, feature-length horror flicks!

I remember when Night of the Living Dead first came out, when I was maybe 9. They must have had a pretty aggressive radio buy, because I can still remember that hollow deep voice from the ads: “Night—” eeeeeeeeeeeeeee! “of the Living Dead.”

All of these movies have a low-bandwidth streaming version for people on dialup, if you don’t mind a tiny screen. The streams and download links are on the left side of the page.

Let’s hear that screamer one more time. “Night—” eeeeeeeeeeeeeee! “of the Living Dead.” (Heh, I have to laugh whenever I remember that.)

Love those headlines

The only thing I can say about this is: I can relate.

Ye Olde Placeholder

Not a whole lot going on at the manor tonight (or most of the week). I’ve been putting a fair amount of work into two of three personal writing projects instead.

As usual, I came home tonight to no supper — less usual, no Mrs. Fetched or Daughter Dearest either. Or The Boy, for that matter. At least he left a note about where he was (fishing at the pond). M.A.E. called shortly thereafter; she and her boyfriend were down at the pond with The Boy. She’s nine weeks along now, and has signed up for (and got) WIC and Medicaid. They came by, chatted for a while, then left. The Boy is making music with Cousin Splat and another friend. Then the girls showed up with supper — hooray! — but missed M.A.E. by not much.

The low tonight is supposed to hit the mid-40s (°F). Considering that we’ve had frost around this time in other years, this isn’t so bad. Things will heat up this weekend, at least figuratively, as Daughter Dearest has All-State tryouts on Saturday and her (OMG, it can’t be!) 18^th birthday on Sunday.

Moving the Tollbooth

Just in case you haven’t heard yet, the British band Radiohead is taking online pre-orders for their new album. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, except that they are letting the purchasers determine the price they pay — from 46 pence (45 of which is a credit card transaction fee) on up. Daring? Maybe.

Radiohead parted ways with their record label (EMI) when their contract ran out in 2003, which gives them the freedom to market their new music online without RIAA interference (or the UK equivalent, whose name escapes me at the moment). Considering that a recording artist’s cut of a retail CD sale is maybe 10%, and assuming a new-release CD goes for $18 (which is typical in the US, not so sure about the UK), then you’d guess that an average sale price of $1.80 average will net them what they would have gotten in royalties. Actually, we should account for recording expenses and hosting/bandwidth fees as well — but they're getting free promotion from everyone (including me) and I’m pretty sure that a $5 average sale price is going to put them ahead of the curve.

Yesterday, The Register interviewed Gerd Leonhard, a media consultant who is putting up his newest book, The End of Control, as a set of PDFs. According the the El Reg article, he writes lovely sentiments on his blog like “Another 12 months for this Radiohead experiment to become the default approach” and “move the tollbooth further down.” To be sure, the labels that comprise the RIAA membership are trapped in an old business model that worked well (for the executives, at least) for a long time — they will not be able to adapt quickly, and it’s just as likely that they will drive away their last retail customers with “piracy” lawsuits. Naturally, they will blame everything and everyone but themselves as they sink into the pool of irrelevance where the buggy-whip manufacturers of the early 20^th century are likely waiting to receive the first industrial casualty of the 21^st.

The recording industry is quick to remind us that they provide valuable services: production, promotion, distribution — and indirectly, with top-shelf acts (like Radiohead) subsidizing the up-and-comers. But when production is a matter of copying files to a server, and distribution is iTunes or eMusic (or services that wish they were iTunes or eMusic), what’s left? Promotion? When is the last time you heard or saw an ad for a new CD coming out? (Actually, I suspect that promotion these days amounts to paying Clear Channel and other giants to play selected tracks on the air, a practice known as “payola” and once frowned upon.) But I’m sure I’m not the only person who rarely listens to commercial radio nowadays. The last CD we bought was an act Daughter Dearest heard on MySpace. The next two CDs I buy will be from groups I’ve heard on streaming stations.

Leonhard says, “The real money is not in the CDs. It's in the gigs, the merchandising, the sponsorships. To make that money, you have to let people further down the highway before they arrive at the tollbooth.” But how do you get the people to the tollbooth? Thus, I still see a role for traditional music publishers: as incubators for new acts. Not nearly as lucrative as it used to be, partly because promotion is all they really have left to offer and they’ll have to actually do some of that promotion — including getting tracks into the hands of streaming stations and giving away some free samples.

Aspiring writers, unfortunately, only enjoy part of the potential that the Internet brings to aspiring musicians. Non-fiction writers, like Leonhard (or my day job, for that matter) can self-publish non-fiction to promote consulting or similar businesses… the book becomes a loss leader, much like a free music track, in the hopes that people will like what they read and pay for related services. But fiction writers, especially novelists, have it more difficult: as I’ve said before, people won’t abandon paperbacks until e-book readers with hi-res screens sell for $10 in the grocery checkout line. In the meantime, it’s a lot harder to print and bind a book than it is to burn a CD — and writers don’t have 10,000 people lining up to buy tickets to a reading.

But the Internet does, however, open up possibilities for new kinds of fiction. I humbly submit that FAR Future is one example: by the time I finished the story, and it wound its way through the publishing system and onto the shelves, it would be perhaps two or three years to 2012 instead of five, the writing would be on the wall, and the parts I guess wrong would make the whole story less believable.

But here’s the bottom line: can authors make a living publishing fiction online? and if so, how? I have an idea along those lines — but like Radiohead and their new album, it would likely work best with an established fan base.

My Saturday To-do List

OK, here’s what’s on my plate today. Stuff I’ve got done is crossed off.

Get a new tire for Daughter Dearest’s car (also got one for Mrs. Fetched‘s)
Check out the lead I had on some scaffolding (didn’t pan out)
Change out the water filters
Sharpen the hatchet
Clean out the rain gutter on Studio FAR (rain gutters make great compost, don’t they?)
Help Mrs. Fetched plant some flower bulbs (that was her idea, btw)
Pick up trash in the back yard (and along the road, found a bunch of old bottles)
Weed-eating (almost didn’t happen, the weed-eater flooded out)
Call my cousin in Florida to wish him happy birthday

Hm… all done. I guess I get to enjoy the rest of the day!

Weekend Cinema

It’s October, which means Hallowe’en is coming, so this weekend we’re bringing you a classic feature-length horror film!

Grab a stake and check out The Last Man On Earth, starring none other than Vincent Price. Watch it online, or download an MPEG from the left side of the page.

Based on the chilling Richard Matheson science fiction Classic "I am Legend" and later remade as "The Omega Man" starring Charlton Heston. This classic features Vincent Price as scientist Robert Morgan in a post apocalyptic nightmare world. The world has been consumed by a ravenous plague that has transformed humanity into a race of bloodthirsty vampires. Only Morgan proves immune, and becomes the solitary vampire slayer.

A vampire flick… I need to make sure Carnacki sees this…

FAR Future, Episode 10

This was going to be Episode 11, but the way things worked out I ended up swapping them. At least I have a post (mostly) ready for later.

---

Thursday, October 4, 2012
Great Timing

It was like flipping a switch here. One week, we were blacked out most of the daylight hours. The next… hardly a glitch. Fall weather has arrived at last, and brought some electricity with it! Of course, with summer gone, the windmill is turning, and the solar panels got delivered yesterday too. Oh well, at least I’ll have everything ready for next summer.

Another thing that fall has brought are tourists on bicycles. Last year, I finally setup the cyclist rest stop that I’ve been meaning to do, and it’s really getting used at the moment. Clubs organize group rides, but that usually means a bunch of small groups, where each group comes together from people riding the same pace… so there’s usually no more than 5 or 6 people there at a time, but they come & go through the day. I keep a water dispenser filled up, or try to these days — I left a sign showing where the outside water is if I’m slow, and the cyclists pretty much take care of it when I don’t. They do a good job of keeping the place clean too; I just change out the trash bags.

On my off-days, or days when not much is going on work-wise, I like to sit down there and talk with the people coming through. Most of the rides now are day/weekend things, but some of the really serious bikers are taking October off entirely and doing some long tours. Some of the weekenders camp out, which I don’t have a problem with. Mrs. Fetched was wary at first, but the clubs have put the word out: be nice to these guys. :-) I’ve brought up the idea of putting up a big pergola in the kudzu for shade, and got a bunch of people volunteering materials and labor. I wasn’t sure they were serious enough to actually follow through, but I just got an email from one of the bigger clubs about setting up a work day. I figure we can use it for a roadside produce stand next year, too.

A news article came down my Yahoo feed, about people who are letting their unused gas allotments expire instead of trying to sell them. Some don’t want to go through the hassle of transferring them, some are doing it out of principle (like the folks who buy carbon permits to take them off the market), and some are concerned about fraud. Shotgun Sam has been directed to talk up that last point, from the sound of it, and he might have finally found an anti-rationing topic with legs… either that, or using the faux-outrage that the wingies project so well as a cover, he managed to suggest several ways that his listeners could join the fun and get more fuel:

• Apply for a separate ration card under the wife’s maiden name, tacking an “apartment number” to the home address
• Lie about your occupation (everyone is a carpenter or farmer!)
• If you live near an abandoned house (and there’s a few of those in the burbs), use the name and address of the last occupant and snag the mail when it comes in

[Note to any NFRD enforcers reading this: I transcribed these suggestions from today’s “Shotgun Sam Weatherby’s Truthcast,” heard on AM750 from 2 to 4 on weekday afternoons and available on the Internet as a podcast. I’ve saved an MP3 if they delete or modify this particular episode. Don’t shoot the messenger.]

Now that I went and disinfected my fingers after typing the title of that show… Of the three, I’d say the last is the safest — the biggest risk is that someone gets the mail before you do, but you don’t have an illegal activity associated with your address (aka: plausible deniability). Sam’s (or rather, his patrons’) motives are obvious: game the system to death. Rationing is working, a bit too well for the cons in fact.

Come to think of it, that article left off another possible reason for allotments expiring: with summer over, people aren’t driving so much. Then again, the going rate on the exchange hasn’t dropped much, which makes me wonder whether people are buying and storing gas. Come to think of it, I’m seeing certain names turning up on the buy side quite a bit, buying up stale allotments and even offering to buy expiring (less than 4 days) allotments on the private exchange. I wonder if there’s any provisions for checking into those folks. On the other hand, if they only blow themselves up… like Larry Niven said, think of it as evolution in action.

continued…

A Toast to The Register

And to New Zealand, from whence comes important and glad tidings.

Now if work would only stop being bipolar…

Trim work, in a nutshell

Working under the “picture’s worth a thousand words” theory, I threw together a little composite image of the current FAR Manor maintenance project to show you what I’m up to. From left to right, you can see: trim with peeling paint, trim that’s been partially scraped, and finally re-painted trim. The latter needs another coat, in my opinion. This is just the part above the garage; I haven't even started on the part above our bedroom (which needs to be replaced, not repainted).

Using a ladder means the work is going pretty slow at the moment. I scrape what I can reach, then paint it. I ran out of time before finishing the paint part; with any luck, I can get a little time in through the week and try to finish this weekend. I might try laying on the roof, reaching over, and scraping that way — it might be less hassle than the ladder, but it will probably not be very comfortable.

Scaffolding. I need scaffolding. Actually, I don’t need the scaffolding until Saturday. Right now, I sure could go for a beer. Too bad I’m out.

You Meet the Nicest People on a Suzuki

Location: out front
Music: BassDrive

One of the more interesting aspects of my new ride is that people tend to come over and talk to me. A lot. I would see that happen from time to time on the Virago, but I think the unconventional-looking bike tends to get people curious. I get people coming up and talking to me all the time when I’m stopped somewhere.

Indeed, the first day I had the bike, I was gassing up and a cop stopped by to check it out, followed by a guy with a similar bike in different trim (dual-sport instead of supermoto). The first week I had it at work, I amused myself by watching out the window at co-workers inspecting it — you could almost see the “WTF?” thought balloons. At the gas station (again), a guy cheerfully talked about wanting to sell his Yamaha since he whacked a tree at 40mph and broke his hip (I suspect that story probably involved alcohol or other mind-altering substances, but he didn’t get into details). He also talked about riding in Baja, which sounded like a real blast but is a bit far to go for a ride IMO.

On a dirt road last weekend, a kid on a four-wheeler caught me at a stop sign and chattered about his friend who got a similar bike. Then yesterday, as I pulled into Home Depot (for a paint scraper), a guy on a decked-out Volusia came in from the other direction and we ended up sharing a sheltered spot where a third motorcycle was already parked. He came walking over to check out the DRZ and started talking about rides and all the other stuff we tend to talk about with our fellows. He’s from a family of riders; his dad rode cross-country a couple years ago and his mom sold him the Volusia because (at age 70) she considers herself too old to ride.

So if you want to meet people, this is definitely one way to do it: get an odd-looking motorcycle and make occasional stops.

Peak Oil: the 20% Remedy

We interrupt FAR Future for a moment…

It has often been said that “less is more,” and that may apply especially to the suburban lifestyle that has come to define the American consumer in the last couple of decades. We end up with too much house, live too far away from work, drive vehicles far larger than needed, then we fill that house with too much stuff. We’re dissatisfied with our lives, and think even more stuff is going to make it better.

I read a great book a while back, Your Money or Your Life, which outlines an iterative process for defining (and having) “enough” — and then going beyond that, to becoming truly financially independent (defined as not having to work for a living). It’s actually quite logical: you track your spending by categories, analyze it every month, and then determine whether you’re overspending, underspending, or spending enough in each category. It’s not about depriving yourself of things you really want, it’s about figuring out what you really want instead of just shotgun-buying more stuff.

What does that have to do with peak oil? Well, both peak oil and the book use a bell curve to illustrate their main points. Oil production, whether looking at one well or the world in aggregate, starts out low, climbs to a plateau and peaks (which is, according to the most reliable experts, where we are now), then falls back. The book puts its own bell curve in a graph (PDF, see page 12), with “stuff” on the X-axis and “fulfillment” on the Y-axis. On this graph, the plateau is what defines “enough.”

Beyond lines on a chart, though, the Culture of More is really what is making peak oil a problem. Bigger houses require more energy to heat or cool. Bigger vehicles and longer commutes require more energy to run. Demanding more stuff at cheaper prices is what has sent our manufacturing jobs to Asia, and sacrificed so many local business to Wal-Mart. With all the money pouring into China and India, their economies are booming… and guess what their growing middle class is doing? Yup, looking to America as the model for the good life. So with production leveling off, and demand still climbing, the plateau is rapidly becoming “not enough.” In classic supply and demand terms, demand is about to overtake the supply, and supply is “constrained” (a fancy way of saying it can’t be increased, despite happy-talk from industry groups and the Saudis).

In FAR Future, I’ve been writing about what things could be like in five years, when there’s not enough fuel to go around. I’m making a rather large and optimistic assumption, though: that governments will accept that supplies are dwindling and most people will make the best of the situation. Delusional conservatives insist that “the free market” is capable of optimizing fuel distribution, but they overlook a crucial point: the “market” is reactive, and we need to be proactive to minimize disruptions in what President-in-Fact Cheney calls “our non-negotiable way of life.” Every gallon of gasoline we use now, every cubic foot of natural gas, is that much we won’t have in the future — when it’s gone, it’s gone (over geological time spans, that’s not completely true, but I don’t expect humans to be around in 50 million years).

Thus, the 20% Remedy. My personal theory is that the country as a whole has overshot the “enough” plateau, and that we would be happier and better off if we cut about 20% out of our resource usage. Why 20%? I’ll admit I pulled the number out of my back pocket, but it can represent (among other things) one day of the work week. Some people are using close to the optimum amount of energy for a satisfying life now, others are using more than 20% too much, so think of 20% as an average figure, or a first approximation. You can arrive at your own figure through the same iterative process as Your Money or Your Life advises for optimizing your expenditures.

What does 20% mean in practical terms?

Commuting: Telecommute, or use transit, once a week — or take a two-person carpool twice a week. Indirect benefits come with scale (i.e. enough people embracing 20%): less traffic means you get “there” faster, and reduces the need for road construction (lower taxes, and asphalt is a petroleum product). Replace your vehicle, when the time comes, with one that uses 20% less fuel for the same amount of driving. Better driving habits won’t net you 20% better mileage with the car you have, unless you’re a serious lead-foot, but 5% to 10% is certainly possible. Combine your trips and plan those combined outings to minimize mileage — it can be fun, like solving a puzzle.

Electricity: Hang out the wash instead of using the dryer, every fifth load. Set the thermostat so that the air conditioner runs 20% less often. Skip every fifth shower to reduce hot water usage. The old standby, switching to CF light bulbs (at FAR Manor, we’re replacing the incandescents as they burn out, to delay that trip to the landfill). Watch 20% less TV and spend the new-found free time walking or getting to know your family.

Food: Fertilizer requires fossil fuels to produce, and winter veggies don’t fly themselves here from South America. Try to grow some of your own food — 20% might be difficult, though. Make up the difference by buying local produce — especially organic produce — at farmers markets or subscription co-ops. Get more than you need and preserve the extra for the winter (canning, dehydrating, etc.), so you aren’t as tempted to look for those South American tomatoes. Skip that fifth “dinner out,” or replace it with a picnic. Make Eat4Today a regular web-stop if you don’t already, and lose some weight (again, 20% might be difficult, but again YMMV).

Plastics: Plastics are a petroleum product! Over non-geological time, plastic doesn’t degrade much, so just using less of the stuff (say… about 20% less?) makes sense. Crafty Green Poet recently wrote a great article about how (and why) to reduce use of plastic in general. There was recently a flurry of articles about bottled water causing a huge upswing in plastic bottle waste — if you don’t like your tap water, consider filtering it and reusing those water bottles. Reuse the plastic you bring home as much as possible, then recycle it.

That’s a start, anyway. By using fewer resources, we can get ahead of the oil depletion curve — and when constraints become mandatory instead of voluntary, they won’t affect us as much. Even if you think a technology-fix is just around the corner, you might still find a more satisfying life inside a smaller footprint. I’m sure I’ve missed a few examples, feel free to provide them in the comments!

Ka-boom

Mrs. Fetched and I had a quarrel yesterday, first in quite a while. It’s been building for some time, after she fell back into the habit of refusing to drive anywhere but commenting on anything she perceived as a flaw in my driving. She finally bounced a check at the Resentment Bank (remind me to post that essay sometime), and I barked something like, “Fine! You’re doing the driving from now on!” Daughter Dearest doesn’t like those episodes very much, and she wasn’t feeling good anyway, so she ate something and went upstairs.

I had agreed to help with the chickens after lunch, since DD wasn’t 100%, but Mrs. Fetched said she didn’t want my help. Fine with me, I thought, and poked around online for a while. About an hour later, “not wanting help” became “but I need it anyway,” when she found a jammed curtain cable. She was civil while I fixed the cable (which involved dismantling a jammed pulley then tightening it to prevent a reoccurrence) and for the rest of the day. By this morning, she was acting pretty friendly (not that friendly, just not hostile).

As she explained it to someone else a while back, “I yell at him, he yells at me, then it’s all better.” But I’d be happier without the running commentary in the first place.

Weekend Roundup

Nancy P has been tantalizing us with pictures of the outside of her writing porch, so I thought I’d reciprocate with an interior view. Sprite (Daughter Dearest’s fat cat) is so excited about getting a chance to write, he’s steaming up the porch! Looks like he might have shorted the keyboard too, the way his eyes are all lit up.

Happy birthday to the parental units! Mom and Dad have back-to-back birthdays, Thursday and Friday. I got to chat with both of them for a while.

I broke down and bought Shout Out Out Out Out’s “Not Saying/Just Saying” album off iTunes this week. I prefer to buy albums by the CD, but it’s kind of hard to find outside of Canada and I was too lazy to mail-order it. You gotta love a band that names one of their tracks “Chicken Soup for the F**k You.”

Daughter Dearest came home with a flat tire yesterday — her car doesn’t even have a spare tire, let alone a jack, so I dug the spare out of my Civic and she helped me change the tire. At least she knows what to do now. I got to thinking about stuff we should pack in an emergency kit (junk in her trunk?), besides a spare & a jack: stop-leak for a quick tire repair, a flashlight of some sort, a gallon of water, and essentials like underwear and a shirt in case she has to spend a night somewhere. That got me wondering what other people keep in their vehicles, if anything, for emergencies. Tomorrow, we’re going to the park with my car so she can learn to drive a manual shift… I figure if she can’t get her tire fixed this weekend, she can take my car to school and I can take the motorcycle.

This was the weekend I was going to tackle the trim around the house. Unfortunately, Mrs. Fetched took me to the chicken houses instead. There’s half the day gone. Then we got lunch and groceries: that’s most of the other half. Oh well, maybe I can get started tomorrow.

And now, it’s time for a walk. I might get out on the porch and do some writing afterwards. Assuming I can fend off Sprite.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, I was cleaning off my desk in the bedroom a couple of nights ago and found my “Blue Sky” list. I think Getting Things Done suggested it; it’s things I want to see happen eventually, no matter how improbable (like living on the coast, far away from chicken houses). I was surprised that one of them (getting below 200 pounds) has been achieved, and a second (The Boy getting straightened out) seems to be on the way to happening. Some others aren’t completely impossible, that may have seemed that way when I made the list.

FAR Future: Episode 9

Step 1: write. check
Step 2: post. whoops

---

Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Time Off, and the Barter Economy

Somehow, Labor Day just wasn’t the same now that every Monday is a day off. More people were around, that was the major difference. We’ve done a lot of cooking on the patio this summer to keep the heat outside, like everyone else, so that really wasn’t different either. I know a lot of people are burning cardboard or paper to cook with, which hasn’t helped the air quality any — but when it comes right down to it, wood, charcoal and even propane create fumes too. I can appreciate making use of the trash instead of chucking it in the landfill, too.

Right after Labor Day, we went up to the resort in Helen for a couple of weeks. We got a Tuesday-Friday block for like $150, and it was even the same unit where we have our regular week so we didn’t have to move our stuff. Internet access was pretty much gone this year; they've given up trying to keep wi-fi running and the units aren’t wired for Ethernet. Sure, I could have gone up to the clubhouse and plugged in, but we were too busy doing things together. (You know: walking, swimming, biking…) Helen is worried that their Octoberfest is going to be a bust this year, but the hotels got smart and chartered a daily bus service down to Atlanta (with a stop in Gainesville). People can come up for a day trip or stay a few days.

The other trendy vacation thing I heard about this year is a “Resort @Home” service — a maid, butler, and cook straighten up your house and wait on you hand & foot for one or two weeks. It sounds really nice, but it wouldn’t work at FAR Manor (maybe next year when the chicken houses are shut down) even if we could afford it. I guess the staff lives in a motorhome unless you have extra bedrooms.

We had a quiet vacation overall. The Boy is installing and maintaining backup power systems (with solar or wind), it’s good money and he’s staying busy; Daughter Dearest is doing a little post-grad work before starting her new job in October. We traded last year for a week in July, so she could spend the week with us without missing the start of the school year. There weren’t too many people here this year, so we didn’t have a problem finding pool chairs and we didn’t get caught behind too many people playing mini-golf. Mrs. Fetched enjoyed walking around this year, which is nice. A lot of Mountain Shadows properties are up for sale, cheap; if I thought we wouldn’t need the money for composting toilets or solar panels, I’d grab one. Of course, then I’d have two places that would need composting toilets and solar panels. I guess not.

More people are taking vacations close to home this year. Since rationing allotments are only good for 3 weeks, you can’t save up all year to burn a bunch of gas on a long road trip. Labor Day was the first holiday since rationing went into effect, and it seems that holidays (or rather, the 2 weeks previous) are going to bring a lot of activity to the exchange, and a bid-up on allotment prices — not everyone is ready to give up their long trips, I suppose. You can get stale (4 to 7 days to expiration) allotments for 25 cents/gallon most of the time, but they went to nearly a buck the week before Labor Day. We usually sell our freshest allotments, since they generally bring a higher price, and use up the stale ones. We haven’t needed to yet, but we figure we can pick up some more allotments if we run short. We’ve cleared close to $20 so far on the exchange — nobody’s getting rich on it — so we just leave it in the account just in case we need some extra go-juice. Given that rationed gas is pretty much available, we may make that trip to Florida after all — the other side of that coin is that we can’t get a place for next to nothing now.

Our new plan, though, might be to start trading. Allotments that have less than 4 days to expire can’t be auctioned on the exchange, but you can use the “private exchange” section to transfer allotments and settle the bill off-line. What with milk topping $7 at the supermarket, one of our neighbors bought a goat for milk. She’s a good producer, I guess — they said they have more milk than they know what to do with, so we might start trading allotments for goat milk. They gave us some to try; Mrs. Fetched thinks it tastes a little strange, but she said she could get used to it. (I tried it in college, and liked it quite a bit, and that hasn’t changed.) We’ve done a lot of produce-swapping this summer, too. I traded peppers and herbs for spinach, corn, and eggs. The in-laws have these green beans that can embarrass zucchini to death (I’ve seen it happen), and they had plenty to trade for stuff they wanted, too. The church down the road started offering their yard as an open-air market the last couple of weeks; I think they’ll start earlier next year.

The in-laws are doing quite well with the cattle nowadays, which is giving them a cushion for when they shut down the chicken houses next spring. Beef might be a luxury item, what with so much corn going to ethanol, but this herd eats grass. That pretty much means the only expense is fuel for cutting hay or taking the cows to the auction. The cattle farm was certified organic last year, and that’s helped a lot too. We’ve put a lot of brainwork, and a bit of physical labor, into trying to minimize the amount of fuel needed for the hay. I’m sure we could come up with some better stuff than what we’ve done so far, but every bit helps. Sooner or later, others will catch on and stop using corn for feeding livestock, but for now the advantage is ours. It’s amazing what you can get in trade for a whole cow… someone even offered them an older SUV (yeah, right — who wants a gas hog these days?). Mostly they take cash, unless it’s from a neighbor; they have enough fuel to run the farm and aren’t lacking for anything else.

What’s your “beef” these days?

continued…

The Boy Is Free, and Other Niceties of Life

The Boy went to his last probation meeting yesterday. All his fines are paid, all his requirements (drug class, DUI class) are met, the probation officer signed off and he’s a free Boy. Needless to say, his attitude was pretty good last night… even if he still reeks of cigarettes. He’s agreed to pay back some stuff he owes us, with his debts getting first cut of his landscaping job — but we’re limiting the bite we take so he can save up for a car. I hope he holds up his end… and I’ve said it before, if he’d ditch the smokes, he could afford a car that much sooner. Someone put a minivan right across the road from FAR Manor’s driveway last week; they want $400 for it but Mrs. Fetched said she saw it blowing oil. I suppose if you had a decent motor already, and a place to effect the swap, it would be a good thing to do. (I have no clue whether that VW he was talking about a while back is still in the picture.)

The girlfriend is no longer, and just after I came up with a blog-name for her (“Snippet” ’cause she’s short). She got the roving eye this last weekend, and I’m not sure what-all happened in a big dust-up the weekend before he came back home, but his tossing her bag of clothes across a front yard was involved. I understand things had started to get pretty rocky between the two of them, and whatever went on in the last two weeks pretty much finished it off. With any luck, he’ll steer clear of “romantic” entanglements for a while; they tend to cloud his already-tenuous judgement.

A deer came through and ate all the foliage off my jalapeño plants! At least they left the peppers. I’m surprised the dogs didn’t chase it off, but they might have been snoozing under the studio. It will be interesting to see whether the plants survive that particular insult. The stupid deer may have also eaten the wild blueberries, because they’re gone now too. There’s not much of a window between ripe and falling-off with those blueberries, so I may have just missed them over vacation week.

I won a set of Future Sonics Atrio headphones (link to review) from The MacObserver. Woo hoo! According to UPS, they should arrive tomorrow. They’re the type of headphones that go in the ear, so I might be able to use them under my motorcycle helmet. Having tunes (or podcasts) on the bike… how decadent. I’m not sure whether they’re blue or black, but who cares?

And the writing was on the wall for a couple of weeks, but it’s now official: SCO filed for Chapter 11. It would be nice to whiz on SCO’s grave when it’s all over, but I suspect the line for that will stretch all the way from Santa Cruz to Vancouver. Special “congratulations” to CEO Darl McBride, who took a cool, innovative company and ran it into the ground with frivolous IP lawsuits. He’ll likely end up in far better financial shape than he deserves to.

I made some parsley-pepper pizza dough last night, and we cooked us a couple of pizzas tonight. Yummers! The Boy had gone off to band practice, and came home a few minutes ago to find all the pizza pretty much gone. I think he found some leftovers though.

Work is finally starting to get less crazy, at least for a while. I have a couple of loose ends to tie up on a couple of projects, but the one that’s been driving me up a wall is done… unless the freak-out artists come up with something else. Today, it was “you need to update the revision number since you fixed the transparency on that photo.” Then, “we need PDF, not EPS” (after asking for EPS yesterday). But I think we’ve passed that water under the bridge now. I got to cut out of the office early so I could take some photos this evening for a certification run; I emailed them to the engineer and he was happy. It looks like I soon might have time to do some administrivia I’ve been ignoring for a few months.

So it’s only Tuesday, but the week after vacation is starting well.

Oddments

Bits of this & that from the last week, that didn’t get into any other post…

When we came back earlier in the week to drop off Big V and toss chickens, I found that The Boy had swiped two bottles of beer. They had only been in the bottle for a couple of days, so I’m sure they were pretty raw (and not much alcohol content either). I’d kind of hoped they would give him a bellyache, but he told me today that they were pretty good and not flat. I’m still going to put off drinking any for a month.

After the wedding yesterday, I came out to Barge Vader to find Daughter Dearest waiting. Even with the windows down, it was still fairly warm in there, so I dug out the keys to open the sunroof. “It’s just because I’m so hot,” DD joked deadpan. “Yeah, I see steam coming out of that little vent there,” I said. Her dress did a good job of covering the decotellage, but had a small opening (I suppose to push the “naughty” button).

“Maybe not,” she said, “but the groom got a good long look as he went by. I don’t think she [our friend, the bride] noticed, though.” Or maybe she did: she smeared him good with the cake downstairs.

I discovered that the (push) lawn mower is pretty well toast: J must have hit a stump or huge rock last time he mowed. He didn’t bend the blade, he bent the shaft. You could say it had the shaft, but doesn’t have it anymore. I also discovered today, that the riding mower has no brakes — makes for an exciting trip down the driveway to mow along the road. I also had to adjust the belt tensioner to get the mower blades to turn. Good thing I got the weed-eater going yesterday, because there’s no way I was going to try riding that beast in the ditch.

I got bored this afternoon and jumped on the motorcycle, using the need to look at new lawn mowers and pick up a how-to for laying patio stone as excuses. I’d just as soon get a reel mower as a replacement, but Home Despot has none. Plenty of online sources, though, all of which think the brands they carry are the best. The Sunlawn line is a bit more expensive than the others, but tend to be a bit lighter (not sure that’s all good or not) and have optional baggers.

Some text-spam scammer has been dinging us for $20/month on our cellphone bill. AT&T is going to fix this, or it’s going to cost them a lot more than $40 (two months). I’ll just turn the phone off, toss it in a drawer, and toss the bills in the trash while getting the PSC and FCC involved.

Cleaning up the grounds, I learned a little bit about the litterbugs that frequent the road passing FAR Manor. They like to eat mostly at Dairy Queen, but Zaxby’s and McDonald’s are also popular. They drink primarily lite beer, but Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Diet Dr. Pepper, and fast food drinks are all represented as well. They smoke a little, and shop at Wal-Mart (of course) — the empty plastic bag was actually a welcome find, but only because I had filled the one bag I’d brought with me. Spammers, of course, are a sub-species of litterbug; neither one has any respect for other people’s property. Or, judging by their diets, their own health either. I’d like to find the morons who thought tossing glass bottles would be a good idea.

Korean baseball is, shall we say, a little strange. The link showed up in my email this week.