a bit more about Haig/_Dead Father's Club_, musings on Peak Oil, Farm Town addiction

First, and least important, if anyone else is totally addicted to Farm Town on facebook, I could sure use some more neighbors, as could another friend of mine. If you aren't addicted to Farm Town, and don't want to get sucked into yet another tamagotchi style game, forget I mentioned it.

Second, the group had a mixed reaction to _Dead Father's Club_, varying from just flat out not liking it, to not liking it but kind of liking the insight into the kid's head and/or not believing the POV (for a kid that inarticulate, that was a lot of detailed insight), to enjoying it as a story without awareness of the Hamlet connection. I don't know that anyone will run right out and read more of Haig's revisiting of Shakespeare.

Third, since I ran out of older posts on Henry Cutler's excellent blog about building cargo bikes and so forth, I thought I'd go digging around to see what the Peak Oilers were saying these days. I used to follow that trend pretty hard, but the recession really took the wind out of the supply-crisis-sails (if, indeed, there was a supply crisis and not a big speculative run up. I'm not able to tell, altho I was certainly convinced at the time there was a supply crisis), A. was born and I got very distracted with more important and more interesting things (or at least, they seemed brighter and shinier at the time). Reading about cargo bikes, bakfiets, etc., got me to thinking that if these suckers were so infinitely appealing to me _without_ an energy crisis/gas price spike, what did the PO folk have to say on the subject? For that matter, I got to wondering what the PO folk had to say about bicycles in general. I knew they'd always been a little mysteriously anti-city.

First stop was peakoil.com (importantly distinct from peakoil.net, which is the ASPO site). I was a little surprised that there was a quiz in the corner about what kind of PO'er you are, with Doomer being a choice. Whoa. Like, self-awareness? What happened?

Next stop, after dipping into the usual news tidbits and confirming that bicycles just weren't getting a lot of play, and to the extent they were, they were being mocked for not solving the kid and/or cargo transport problem (clearly, two trends that hadn't met up yet), was peakoildebunked, a blog that went onto hiatus more or less as soon as I found it. But it had been around for a number of years, so there's so choice material in the posts and the comments threads. Somewhere along the line, the "denier" in chief over there came out explicitly saying he believed oil was finite and would eventually run out. A certain number of (sensible) people in the comments felt he should have retitled the blog dieoffdebunked, but that wouldn't fully capture what he was up to. He has post after glorious post on electric vehicles of all kinds: scooters, cars, trucks, cargo-handlers. He has post after glorious post on how you can make fertilizer (and just about anything else) without oil. He's also a big ole fan of the nukes, which I find annoying, but he uses the C word! Constantly! It's refreshing to read someone talk about conservation strategies both as a transition if we hit a wall (which with the high prices there for a bit, we really did) and as a long-term strategy, a la Japan and the EU. He debunks the abuse of Jevon's Law (the claim that increasing efficiency just leads to higher use, without addressing price issues).

One of the weirder things I've encountered was the conversations I had a year ago in Seattle in May with a series of friends. Everyone said, no, they hadn't really made any changes in response to expensive gas, but then launched into detailed descriptions of commute changes and trip consolidation and other stuff. I think that conservation is like sex for most people: harder to talk about than to actually engage in.

Doom! (NOT the game.)

I love Doom. I really do. Doom makes me feel completely normal. I blame my upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness by parents who really believed in spanking. Hard and often. I honestly believed my parents were prepared to let me die or kill me themselves if I didn't toe the line and I'd internalized their values so thoroughly I thought they were correct to do so.

It wasn't until I realized they were very, very wrong that I could even contemplate having children of my own.

Yet DOOOOOOM holds a lot of appeal. Fortunately, my attraction to Doom (eschatophilia -- other people made that word up before I thought of it) has manifested mostly as What Can We Do to Make Sure It Does Not Actually Happen and only secondarily as stockpiling food and ammo (and these days, I don't even bother with the ammo -- I figure this is a sign of maturity and mental and emotional well-being, but it could also be concern about guns and kids). So while there are bags of dried beans and grains in the house, we actually grind them up and make soup and bread with them on a fairly regular basis (or waffles or whatever).

I was somewhat surprised to see that there was some self-awareness in the PO crowd, that some people were responding to the idea of Peak Oil with calls for Nazi Style eugenics and population control, and that That Was Perceived As Not OK. I'm a little disappointed that people are going, dude, not OK, rather than saying things like, hey, Not OK, sign that you were abused as a child, get some help and oh, BTW? Poor societies do not actually off their handicapped. Not how it works. Most importantly from a pragmatic perspective, if you adjust your use of the local environment so you are using it at less than carrying capacity, someone or something else will come in and take up that unoccupied niche. Did you _pay attention_ to evolution? At any point?

Interestingly, there's also awareness of a cohort: that the Doomers advocating eugenics and PowerDown and crap like that are in their 50s or older, and the optimistic PO crowd is trying to figure out how to run everything off electricity generated by alternative fuels, rather than come up with replacement liquid fuels. And that crowd is rather distinctly not in its 50s. Tell you what: if you have little kids, you are not going to be in a hurry to set up a anything-to-liquids conversion plant, you'll really being trying to figure out how to wind coal _down_, not increase usage, and nukes are going to give you the heebies. Making wind, solar and (therefore) batteries work is going to be really compelling if you're looking at the person who is going to have to clean up after whatever you decide to do and they're drooling at you in a Very Cute Way. It's a whole lot easier to say, ah, let someone else worry about the waste problem -- fast breeders are totally reasonable -- if your kids are obnoxious teenagers, or 20 something year olds who refuse to have anything to do with you.

Or, I suppose, if you've aged out of your reproductive years without having reproduced.

ETA: h/t to peakoildebunked for this link:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/15480

I'm not sure what to make of this (I'm assuming Heinberg is not making up "Urinetown"). I guess I just want to grab someone by the short hairs and scream "History! History! History! Oh, and pay attention closely now: India! Nightsoil men! Composting! The tragedy here is that people in Urinetown have been throwing away valuable commodities like shit and pee so long that when their preferred carrier (clean water) is in short supply, they can't bring themselves to do what they should have done all along: converted their wastes into valuable soil amendments.

I might let the short hairs go at this point, but I might twist and continue:

I had _hoped_ that Peak Oil would save our climate. That we would be forced to conserve and be Smarter about our use of energy. But in fact, you folk are so Amazingly Aggressively Stupid that it's going to be the other way around. What we have to do to preserve our climate is going to reduce and eventually remove our dependency on fossil fuels, long before they run out.

Then a good kick, and off I could go, relieved of a large stock of pent-up aggression and rage, leaving me feeling all content and pacific.

Lovely little fantasy there.

Sharing

I've been having all kinds of time wasting fun the last couple of days. I had been so busy for a while, I really forgot how great it was to do completely unproductive things. It's really fantastic.

Being me, a lot of my time wasting is done on a laptop while I'm simultaneously keeping my daughter from doing something really bad like, choking on something she should not have had. Sometimes, she sleeps, which takes even that minimal responsibility down to a very low level (viz. keep an ear out and an occasional eye on the baby monitor). Moments like this aren't quite as free-wheeling as my retired and still single days, when I would be going, why am I not climbing up a trail somewhere, but they're pretty good. Because I have time to think about unimportant things. Like sharing.

I may have briefly mentioned a really funny set of photos, commentary and responding comments when a guy took a bunch of pictures of people on bicycles in Nieuw Markt. He didn't understand a lot of what he was looking at (like, folding bicycles, and, Nieuw Markt is surrounded by what we would call in English a "rotary", if only people in America in general knew what they were), and his attitudes towards what he was looking at are the stuff of college undergraduate honors seminars taught by an anthropologist (ah, for the days when I got college credit for hanging out with Stevan Harrell and a small group of other students and talked about interesting things like the Cultural Revolution, or Manners). I'm going to drill down on the shared bicycles bit.

Sure, there were a lot of kids on bicycles with adults. But there are also a lot of people riding bicycles in Amsterdam (or A'dam, as the Cool People write) with someone sitting on the rack. I've never been entirely certain _why_ (where is their bicycle, I always wanted to ask. I now suspect that they left it a couple stops back on the tram because they didn't have the fare for the bike, or they weren't riding far once they met with a friend or whatever), but the guy taking the pictures was correct in noting that women are "driving" bicycles with men riding not quite as often as the reverse, but it isn't particularly uncommon. Fortunately, a Dutchwoman who was in one of the photographs (in high heels, which I'd find a whole lot more shocking if I didn't keep finding myself on my bike in a dress and nice shoes these days) wrote in to explain that in general, the owner of the bike drives (my term), unless there's a really substantial difference in size. People are picky about their bikes.

So that's kind of interesting.

I bought a Honda Fit. My husband bought a Honda Odyssey. For a while, when he had the van and I was still driving my Subaru, I couldn't get him to leave the van at home for me and T. to use, because he hated the amount of road noise in the WRX. Part of the Fit purchase was, is it quiet enough for him to use as a commuter car. It was. But the Fit is really still my car and the Odyssey is still really his car. We trade. We share. It's all good, since we negotiated to buy cars the other person liked as well. Now our arguments about who drives devolve into debates about my ability to maintain a consistent speed, and whether his driving is likely to make me carsick. If we've just been out to eat and he had a margarita on a mostly empty stomach, life is grand. I drive. He's happy. Otherwise, the debate can get ugly, so I sympathize with people and their my-car-I-drive strategy.

Back when gas was over $4 a gallon, and looking like $10 in the future, a number of people who had more than one adult in their household, and one or more cars per driver, found themselves in a situation where the rational vehicle use for the household required people to drive each other's cars. Sometimes people were willing to do this. Sometimes they were more willing to carpool or ride public transit than they were to swap cars. That struck me as a little odd at the time, but this is really what price theory is all about. What's it worth to you?

Today, I ran across Peak Oil crap (ahem) quoting Asimov's Bathroom of One's Own (that's not really what it's called and furthermore, there's a Heinlein story/essay/something or other with a title very close to that) and mentioning some play "Urinetown" which was inspired by an American backpacker encountering European pay-to-pee toilets (never mind that those have, in fact, existed in the US at points in the past and, for all I know, present), all of which more or less added up to oh my god the world is ending if I don't have exactly the kind of toilet facilities I expect to have all the time for free for my exclusive use.

WTF?

I remember when my family went on vacations to the Captain's Inn on Whidbey Island, when it was still a teeny tiny little inn with shared bathrooms down the hall. It was really exciting for my parents when they added cottages with their own bathrooms, which was shortly followed by the discovery of Whidbey by out-of-staters who promptly overbooked and overpaid and made things difficult for cheap bastards in Seattle looking for a family weekend out of town. My parents found this en suite bathroom really exciting because it meant they only had to share that bathroom with their four children, not some significant fraction of the rooms on the floor. When my dad built the upstairs on the house and added another bathroom, we were mostly excited about having a dedicated shower (my dad objected to us showering in combos because of the risk to the wallboard) -- there were still 6 people sharing 3 bathrooms and let me tell you, when 6 people come back from 2-3 hours of religious stuff with minimal access to the facilities, that's not the best ratio. We always mocked houses that had a 1-1 ratio of bathrooms to bedrooms (and we were sharing bedrooms in that house). Houses with more bathrooms than bedrooms were completely incomprehensible to us.

I feel like I'm constantly suffering from gear-grinding culture shock in my own country. Who expects to have their own bathroom, unshared by anyone? It _sucks_ living alone. There's no one to make listen to you when you want to rant about your day. So _what_ if you have to share the sink? I chauffeured people around when I was driving a CRX (not a typo -- I do mean the lovely little two-seater from back in the day). And I do mean people, which I shouldn't admit to because it was illegal to have more than 2 people in that car at once, but I did that, too.

So I have this conversation with one of my broker/financial advisors/who knows what they call themselves now. This is the new guy, who is still dumb enough to suggest I sell my remaining Amazon stock, write covered calls, blah, blah, bleeping blah. I've been down this particular road over the last decade enough times that I go straight to Cold Anger and I'm pretty sure this guy is smart enough to pick up on it. I'm pretty sure because he asked point blank how we could have a better relationship. I suggested we gossip a bit about the markets. It was awkward, at first, but he really tried hard. I was pleased with that, altho like most broker/financial oh never mind, his idea of a sense of humor would probably play better with some jackass conservative Republican, as opposed to me, who, if I identify as anything, would probably identify with anarcho-socialism.

Oh, wait, did I post that? Whatever.

Partway through the conversation I mentioned that I really like my Fit (Yeah, We Know You Do Shut Up Already), but I wished it had been available with more options, and even what's available now is not as much as I want and I'd be willing to pay so why isn't anyone selling this to me? There was a segue off to the Smart Car, which the financial whatever called a Stupid Car because he thinks it should get a Lot better gas mileage for the teeny tiny seems unsafe factor. He was actually fairly cagey about how he worded this; I suspect he was concerned about my reaction. Smart guy, altho not smart enough. He assumes that they aren't selling that well, because there are plenty on the lot he drives by. I mention the kei car and Japanese regulations as described on the wikipedia page and whether anyone might be looking to sell more expensive small cars. At some point he brought up TaTa motors because another client bought the ADR which he thought UBS had a sell recommendation on, but there's new research out and he'll send it my way.

We also had a little discussion about the springtime flooding and credit crisis affecting the planting season in the midwest. I pointed out the probable downstream effect on meat prices (down when more animals are slaughtered, rather than feed them too-expensive feed, and then up later when the supply drops -- I know this from the drought in the South during the early 2000s); he wasn't interested. I'm not sure if this is because he knows more about commodities than I do, or less, but I have a theory.

After I got off the phone (A. woke up from nap #1), I went digging for information on Honda sales and Smart car sales and didn't get very far (interruptions), but I did run across one interesting assertion: many Smart cars are sold to households as a third car.

Because if it's not mine, and it's not yours, but it is ours, then we can probably share it.

Wow.

Who am I to mock this? I've ordered my Townie with the kid seats so I can yank the Bike Tutor off the Bianchi so I can get it back as My Bike. I don't like to share, either. I'm trying to figure out what to put the Bike Tutor on, so that we _can_ share. And it's looking more and more like a Pure Trek Men's 3 spd. Not his. Not mine. Ours.