From Streetcars To Spaceships

THERE IS NO REAL ENERGY SHORTAGE. DAMMIT.

[Note: I've revised this post. In the cool of daytime, I figured that it could stand to be a little less pissed off. So I've changed it to leave fewer things assumed but unsaid and a few things clarified. I've also added links. But I'm leaving the initial title. Yeah, it's incendiary; sometimes ya gotta shout a bit to get important things said.]

Okay, this "we're all gonna die from lack of fuel" bullhockey is really starting to get on my nerves. We are so far away from having no real options we might as well still be living in the fifties and I'm tired of all this gloom and doom, end of the world mahooah.

Now, first of all, I'm not talking about the greenhouse effect or loss of species diversity or any of the considerable number of real crises that are out there right now. I'm not talking about that here.  This post is no more or less than a response to the "peak oil" people. I'll readily concede that we are running out of oil. But not quite that fast, not at a speed that demands the kinds of "heroic measures" that then get just about everybody fatalistic because "we'll never be able to get people to do that sort of thing."

I'm also convinced that much of the "peak oil" and "energy crisis" mania currently ramping up in America is a result of media hype paid for by utility and energy companies looking to justify yet more government subsidies and exemptions to build power plants and transmission systems that we don't need and can't afford. When are people finally going to realize that the California blackouts were NOT a result of a lack of capacity, they were a result of corporate greed?  To try to "fix" this by funding yet more corporate greed is dimwitted, if not flat out mentally ill. We don't need more power plants, let alone nuclear ones; we need to fight against future Enrons. I was in New York during the 2003 blackout and have been watching the hearings since and I can tell you that there, too, we did not need increased capacity. We needed more conservation, more transparent procedures by the utility companies, and a modest implementation of the kind of accessable infrastructure Thomas Edison would have implemented in the first place if the technology had been available.

Another thing I'm not going to get into here is that, from what I can see, a lot of the current "shortage" comes from oil companies and countries like Saudi Arabia using the current delusional mood out there to jack up prices for no reason beyond their own profits. Does that create an effective reduction in available supply on a given day? Yes. But it doesn't mean as much as it appears to mean about our reserves. Afaict, "peak oil" is sounding more and more like a religion so I'm quite sure that I'll be accused of blasphemy for writing this. 

Oh, well.

I'm going to make this short. Here are real world, low tech, low capital, low skill ways that we can quickly and cheaply massively cut down our net energy usage. If we didn't have a bunch of crazed idiots running our federal government, we would probably be starting to do some of these on a national scale already. Note, btw, that I'm not including anywhere near all of the things that can and should change. Many of them will, afaics, change without anybody needing to push them any more than is happening already. Now that the price of gas has gotten as high as it has and things like LED garden lights are so obviously superior, I'm seeing quite a few things that were once hardcore "green" showing up at Home Depot, and selling. I will, however, list a few more of these at the end of this piece. What you'll mostly see here is a list of things that a sane government could and may yet encourage (or, as they like to say, "incent") to keep us from energy disaster.

And, in case it isn't obvious, these are also steps you might want to consider taking right now. Just because the great coach potato masses out there need help to get them to do these things doesn't mean that you should wait.

1.) Build cob walls right onto the side of the walls of most low buildings. No tearing down needed. Just a six to ten inch thick cob wall plopped right onto the shingle or vinyl siding or cinderblock or whatever. Boom. Instant superinsulated walls. Encourage earth berm extending beyond that.

Add greenhouses (low tech and built largely out of reused windows would work fine) reaching up to the rafters and built onto the side that gets the most sun. 

Put trellises over much or all of sloping parts of the roof (again, reused stuff like surplus gridwall will do fine) covered in ivy, and planters along the roofline.

Do these things along with the measures discussed below and most buildings will stop needing much fuel for heating or cooling ever again.

I would like to add solar hot water heaters to this list. They certainly are amazing. But while they're great, they're still both expensive and complex for most people. I've met a few too many ecologically-minded people who have removed solar hot water systems to take their viability for granted. But consider this a respectful nod and a call for more research and development. The same goes for geothermal cooling.

This is supplemented by adding one and a half inches of insulation inside rooms, right over the existing walls, covered by a new coat of hardboard or equivalent and a skimcoat of plaster. Put the trim back on, remount the outlets a bit further forward, and the room gets a bit over two inches smaller but is now also far better insulated without having to tear out much at all of what was there in the first place. This only needs to be done, btw, for walls that face the outside of the structure. It also, I suspect, is the first, most effective thing to do for large buildings like schools that have paltry budgets but do have a dedicated building staff. After all, this is the kind of thing that, once you've got your rhythm going and optimized your technique and tools, should go pretty doggone fast and be pretty cheap to do.

2.) Put in air ducts from the outside of buildings to the cooling coils or even the interiors of refrigerators. Whenever the outdoor temperature goes below room temperature, the fridge gets bathed in air from outside. Simple vents and heat exchangers keep it all going right. Whenever possible chilling systems are moved out from under the areas to be chilled. The idea that we put one of the hottest motors in a building (the compressor for a fridge) right under the area we're trying to keep coldest (that same fridge) blows my mind. An aggressive program should be instituted to have refrigerators built in from scratch as part of a house, returning to the original idea of an superinsulated box under or beside a chilling mechanism, well ventilated and connected to a flow of cool or even cold air.

3.) One inch thick cement pads built into the inside of fridges. Two to five inches if there's room. This reduces variability of temperature quite a bit. Cuts fuel use even more. Should cost about twenty bucks per fridge or freezer. There are a number of variations on this idea but the point is to add quite a bit of constant thermal mass within chilled areas. Personally, I'm getting a piece of marble cut for mine, but a.) I dumpster dived my slabs already, b.) I have luxurious tastes, and c.) I've got friends with wonderful skills and tools I can barter the work with. 

4.) Flextime of the sort California was well on the way to implementing in the nineties when the dimwit brigade took over. Rush hour is our enemy and must be fought with every tool we have.

5.) Streetcars. Lots of cheap, small streetcars in every small town, every suburban street, even every large office complex. See my article on building same. Dedicated rights of way for mass transit of all sorts also makes a huge difference, as do car-free streets.

6.) Skylights and light pipes  all over the place.

7.) LED lighting in hallways and other places where dimmer, less color-optimized lights will do. These LEDs to be powered from solar panels or some other form of power generation right there on that structure. Grid demand for those fixtures goes to zero. Given where the technology is going, LED streetlights should be worth converting to by the end of next year. Adding to this, a modest but widespread and well publicized buyback program for non-LED holiday lights, nightlights, and the rest.

For all such LED-solar panel systems, intertie should be discouraged. LEDS work best on 4 or 5 volt DC. Why in the name of all that's holy do we insist on massively reducing their efficiency and equally massively increasing their cost by routing all power to them on 110 volt AC circuits that then require tons of step-downs, resistors, control circuits, and so forth?

8.) Bus systems extended to run until 3:00 a.m. in every town of over fifty thousand people. Jitneys at other hours and in smaller communities. The reduction in drunk driving costs alone should pay for a lot of this.

9.) Everybody over the age of ten gets a free bike or subsidy to buy a bike. Every ten years they get a credit towards buying another one. Skateboards can also qualify if they are used as transportation. Anything that provides transportation but doesn't put demand on the grid. Personally, I think that people who can document that they walk to work more than a few blocks should get the same subsidy for shoes and such but maybe that's just me.

10.) Massive implementation of greenroof and urban agriculture as has been done in the Philippines and Cuba. See my entry on low cost greenroof. You would be amazed at how much food can be grown per block in an urban area. It should go up even more when all commercial establishments are allowed to reduce required parking by thirty percent as long as half of the converted land must be vegetated.

11.) A buyback program for CRTs, working or not. All CRTs to be crushed and turned back into raw materials. Same for computers from before 2002 and printers from before 2000.

12.) Nationwide program cancelling laws forbidding more than a certain number of unrelated people from living together and related zoning codes and other regulations meant to force a nineteen-fifties ideal of single family, single purpose dwellings on lawn-covered, separated lots. Shared housing is our friend and we should treat it so. In fact, we should encourage it. I'm already active on this issue.

Moving on, afaic, most lawns are insane. For those of you not yet aware, allow me to introduce Food Not Lawns. This applies doubly so to public parks. Not that they should be turned over entirely to food production, but that we should be replacing many of the endless areas of energy-hungry, ecologically poisonous short grass with perennial plantings and the kind of landscaping that we all admire so much in places like the parks of Olmstead and Vaux. Oh, fwiw, Hyde Park in London, one of the places that defined what a park is, now has a breathtakingly beautiful program in place converting some of their lawns to meadows.

13.) Classes in cooking and food preparation to be instituted in ALL U.S. schools, from kindergarten to 12th grade. Each school is also responsible for providing three square feet of planting space per student on which that student will grow food for use by the school. The Edible Schoolyard program shows how this can be done and why. Also see the greenroof comments above for more information on how. In addition, implement a Japanese-style policy of students handling much of the building maintenance.

14.) Each of the 4,000 counties of the United States is required, within three years, to commit at least one square mile to growing biofuels of some sort. Algae stacks are fine. Switchgrass is fine. Whatever works best as locally determined though a toughening standard of net BTUs per acre will eventually be implemented.

15.) All government direct and indirect subsidies of meat, grain, and dairy production phased out. The sanest course is that over five years a ten cent per pound tax be added to meat and equivalent ones to factory farmed dairy to pay for habitat restoration and research into ways to minimize energy and other resource use among ranchers, diary farmers, and other creators of these goods. Grain producers? Take them off government welfare and things should change mighty fast. Would such taxes be regressive? Yes. There are ways to counter that problem for the truly needy and I don't doubt that you can figure them out yourself.

16.) Vigorously enforce the anti-trust laws and laws against fraud, especially against transportation companies, agribusiness, building trades, and makers of electrical devices. We've seen what a hundred years of systematic fraud has left us with. See my post on 1930's and 40's fraud by the West Coast rail and bus companies or just Google "Snell Report" if you don't know about this already. And again I say, much of what is perceived as an energy shortage is, in reality, an artifact of too much Enron-style activity warping our society.

All of the things I've briefly described above could be done concurrently for less than this perverse bunch of wars have been costing us. And I don't doubt that I'm missing at least two dozen other equally viable low tech, low capital, high multiplier options. We have all the tools we need. We just need to use them.

Notice that I barely address new energy technologies. I'm sure as hell not going to suggest anything as delusional as building more nuclear power plants. We are entirely capable of reducing our energy consumption to a level that gives us plenty of time to develop sustainable energy technologies, living mostly on our petrochemical reserves in the meantime.

We have more promising new energy technologies on the horizon that you can shake a stick at, from tidal power to thermal depolymerization. We've got them running energy positive right now. It's all about process engineering at this point. Americans are really good at process engineering when we put our minds to it. Aluminum used to cost more than gold. Now we make lawn chairs out of it. That's process engineering.

I also haven't said a word about industrial energy usage. Don't think that I'm not tempted. But if I get into that here this post will get three or four thousand words longer. You don't want that, do you?

Also, as I mentioned above, some things are changing already.

Here in Portland the public school system is in the process of revising their overall standard for building construction and maintenance to focus on sustainable practices in general and conservation in specific. And having spoken to one of the initiators of this change I can assure you with complete confidence that this was motivated primarily by a shortage of money and a very cold-blooded realization that conservation, things like better insulated buildings and more modern lighting, are a key part of being able to pay the bills at the end of each month.

Other changes? Demand is working; walk into any Safeway or other supermarket these days and you'll find growing percentages of what they sell are organic or otherwise promoted as sustainable. I am pretty confident that they'll continue to get on the locally sourced bandwagon as well as long as demand keeps driving it, not to mention shipping prices.

I've also been tracking a slow but steady shift for things like pizza delivery from cars to bikes or electric vehicles. Not only is it more responsible, their smaller size makes them more nimble and less expensive to use, park, etc.

We're also seeing an implementation of heavy and lightrail worldwide. From what I'm seeing, this is accelerating and has more and more public and government support.

Also, the peak demand in many parts of the country is from summer air conditioners. Well, even beyond the measures I cite above, solar is finally getting widespread enough to address this. When do solar panels give the most power? On hot summer days. Also, the parts of the country that are hungriest for that additional power are building wind farms on a pretty serious scale. The bottom line: it's being dealt with.

We're also just at the beginning of a wonderful thing: landfill mining. Methane recovery is getting pretty common and I'm starting to see what I suspect is the start of a hugely important trend, companies buying mineral and other recovery rights to landfills. Modern advances in robotics and sensors, some of which are coming out of sorting technologies used at recycling centers, make this much more cost effective. This alone, if it gets going in a serious way,  makes me want to dance in the streets and hug people.

And, to make a very peak-oil specific point, we are doing just fine at making plastics from non-petrochemical sources. Again, this is process engineering and plastics are already a product of comprehensively artificial processes that convert some of the most common things on earth, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc. into molecules that not only don't need to be made from petrochemicals, like diesel fuel, they're actually less weighed down with impurities once we switch to non-petrochemical sources. We're running out of oil; not carbon. Really.

We have the means to cut our demand way down. We still have serious fuel reserves, even aside from coal. And we're advancing at flank speed on implementing improved energy options. We only have a crisis if we don't do the kinds of things that I list above. Will we still be in such good shape ten years from now if we don't get our act together? No. While per user demand can be greatly decreased, I agree that with over two billion people joining the high-consumption middle class right now, we either change comprehensively what that means or watch civilization fall and hundreds of millions of people die.

We do have an absolutely critical problem here. But I don't think that it's as simple or as dire as many people I see around me are making it out to be. And I am certainly tired of people trying to use this to shut down everything from space travel to long-term educational planning. I'm also damned sick of people believing claims by the usual suspects that we need to clearcut yet more woods and spend yet more money to build multibillion dollar powerplants and whole new power transmission infrastructure here in North America to address an increase in per capita demand that is neither a given nor best addressed by yet more corporate-welfare-bloated megaprojects. As I've just explained, from what I can see, that per capita increase may not be happening here at all and even if it is, giving more billions and more power to the rapacious, amoral likes of General Electric and Halliburton makes far less sense than spending a fraction of that on the kinds of things that I cite above.

You want to tell me that we have no hope? Talk to the hand. I've spent a hell of a lot of time studying this and I just don't believe it.

Yet again I say it - don't believe the hype.

-Rustin

Invisible what? For whom?

Yesterday I bought some Metro-style shelving components at a thrift shop off Burnside and Grand. It is all configured as a clothing rack, but to me it's four posts, two shelves, some sleeves, a metal rod, and a set of low-quality but handy wheels. Forty bucks in my neighborhood? Cheap at the price.

So, since I live on 13th right past Belmont and the sun is shining, I decided to wheel them home today rather than doing anything more complex or calling a cab.

Seven blocks up, about twelve blocks over; a distance like that and somebody is going to say something. Sure enough, a woman with her husband evidently had to make a cute comment about the guy wheeling an empty clothing rack up the street.

"You taking it for a walk?" she asks with a bit of an "aren't I clever" expression.

"You could say that.", say I, "But most importantly, with all these parades this time of year, somebody needs to bring new clothes for the emperor."

I love my life.

What do you do when your satire is being overtaken by reality?

Back in 1999 I left my last corporate job (acting IT director of This Old House Magazine) in a wave of mutual frustration and discord. Fwiw, I had gotten in a vicious feud with the powers that be because I was insisting that the AOL-Time/Warner merger was going to be a disaster and I was refusing to merge our email system with the AOL one, I had been called lazy and/or incompetent by a Time, Inc. V.P. because I hadn't been able to get him and his staff the kinds of subnotebooks I had agreed were an excellent idea, and I had spent about a hundred thousand dollars getting current equipment like real workgroup printers for the departments (such as marketing!) that hadn't been upgraded in five years while telling the art director that it would take a while to get her the kind of dual screen, massively souped up, massively untested Mac she was demanding.

And then they held up my last three thousand dollars worth of paycheck for about two months.

And told me that my health insurance was expiring a month before I had been told it would.

I was pissed. And I decided for the first and last time in my adult life to try to write fiction. Now, I write the worst dialogue of anybody in the known world. And my characterization makes the WWF seem nuanced and subtle. So fiction isn't usually my thing. But in the mood I was in, writing a Swiftian, bitter, "modest proposal" kinda story seemed like just the sort of tonic I needed. First I dashed off a few even worse short stories that the world has been saved from and my mood while writing those was so foul that my apartmentmate was afraid to be in the room with me when I was at the computer. Then I sat down and wrote out a "vast exaggeration" of the world going very wrong. The kind of thing that would happen if our society just flat out lost all common sense. I put lots of work into putting in all sorts of telling details. The freaky ruling at the center of it came from the Ninth Circuit because they have a reputation for that kind of thing. The mechanism for the virus was based on recent DNA findings. My crazy right wingers were based on recent statements by anti-abortion preachers.

And when I was done I felt much better. And I thought that what I had written was pretty doggone funny. In a sick, end of the world, kind of way, of course.

Well, my friend Sara says that I telegraph like Western Union so I'm sure you know what I'm about to say next. By today, about seventy percent of what was in that story has come true. And I just saw an article on Reuters that puts another piece in place, in just about the way my story had predicted.

And since my story ended with the reestablishment of widespread slavery throughout the western world, I'm just not feeling any too secure right about now. And I don't find my story funny these days; not at all.

Folks, we'd better make damned sure that Obama wins and successfully takes office. Because if we don't we're really and truly going to see Western civilization fall. It's just that simple.

Portland Policing - Room for Improvement

I had a nice, quiet, geeky day planned. First a run of the Air & Waste Management Association expo, then the People's Coop summer festival, then pick up some books at Powell's, spend the rest of the afternoon and evening working with Almendra, and call it a night.

Well, AWMA wasn't exactly delightful but it was information-packed, so I finally got out of the Oregon Convention Center with my shoulder bag stuffed to overflowing and carrying posters in a roll three feet long. By the time I was waiting for the bus in front of the OCC, at around 2:00 pm, I wasn't exactly chatty.

But when I heard somebody about fifty feet away yelling out, "You called the police!" You snitched! Do you know what happens to snitches?!" I was sure as hell not just going to ignore it. Especially since I could see that the guy yelling was advancing, with another guy at his back, on some nervous-looking Hispanic guy who was backing away and making placating gestures.

Well, some days, it's just inevitable that you're gonna get involved, and maybe my body language was what did it, but the Hispanic guy, looking left and right, sees me and starts making his way towards me, most of his attention on the prick still yelling at him but turning a bit towards me and talking in Spanish. He gets close enough for me to hear him clearly and I can't understand most of it but one word stands out. "Police". I say some variation on "sorry, no habla Espanol" and he pauses, and says simply "Call police. Please call police."

I'm not going to go through what happened gesture by gesture but I start trying to interpose myself between the  belligerent guy* and the Hispanic guy while the Hispanic guy keeps saying that he didn't steal anything and something about medical records and waving a bunch of folded papers and the jerk keeps yelling that the Hispanic guy was trying to steal something and that he's going to beat him up, all while the sidekick orbits around us spouting supportive crap for his threatening buddy. I, of course, am saying "so, if he tried to steal something, you should be delighted to have us call the police" and jerkboy is at first trying to ignore my comments and finally, when I firmly stand in his way and ask, shall we say, quite assertively, says that they already had to talk to the cops earlier that day and don't want to do it again.

Eventually I physically blocked this charming individual, had my arm pushed away, and was threatened myself, and finally got a chance to call out to a rather large individual who was passing, "hey, could you watch these guys for a minute while I call the cops" and as I reached for my cell, our two happy people ran away.

So, what's my point? (Other than where the hell was OCC security during all of this?) Well, I did start to ask the bus driver to call it in (as I had already said I was going to do since the bus was visible by the time the two of them ran off) but got a less than favorable reaction so I waited to get home, which took about ten minutes. I repeat, about ten minutes. I called the Portland police, and got somebody on the phone. She asked me a few questions, asked me if I wanted somebody to come by and I said no but that I would be glad to come by tomorrow and fill out a report. She said that actually, no, given what had happened and where (right near one of the busiest local light rail stops) she wanted me to talk to a dispatcher immediately. I go on hold and get transferred to a 911 operator. Who, predictably, asks a very few questions, tells me that since there isn't a crime in progress or a known location for them, there's nothing to do, says goodbye, and hangs up.

So, finally we get to our point. I make no claim to be any great expert on the criminal justice system. I've only read about fifteen books on various aspects of it and have only spent about that many hours over the years discussing street procedure with various first responders, mostly cops. But I was under the impression that one of the most effective ways to fight street crime is to determine habitual offenders, keep track of them, and make bloody damn sure that they know that they in particular and people like them in general don't go unnoticed.

Now, again, I'm no expert and it's been years since I've lived in a seriously dangerous neighborhood, but to my untrained eyes, these guys, in particular the more active one, had "habitual offender" in big screaming neon letters flashing over their foreheads. And Portland, right now, right this past few months, is going through a rather high profile debate about street crime, specifically harassment by young groups of thugs on and near MAX stations. And our mayor, a former police chief, has said that this is a priority, as has our de facto incoming mayor, himself quite the urban policy and street activity maven.

So, tell me, why the frak wasn't I told, "sir, could you sit down with an officer who patrols that area, and say what you just said to me?" Hell, I used to live in New York City, not exactly a land of sweetness and light, and three times, when I told an officer about an event I witnessed in much dicer neighborhoods than this one, I was asked to come in and give a report. And I've gotta say, in each case, most notably the one involving the late lamented Transit Police, they were on their game. They sat their in their dirty, grimy, badly lit offices and did their best several different ways to break my story. "So, you saw the four guys...". "No, sir, I only saw three." "Okay, the three guys, came in the door over by the...", "No, sir, each one came in a different door." And so on. They kept me there for something like forty minutes answering questions.

A couple of months ago a woman I know was menaced more explicitly and randomly than I was today and I will gladly admit that the policewoman who took her statement (I was asked to come along) was cool, efficient, and thorough. So was, for that matter, the first woman I spoke to today. Well, maybe not thorough.

I should probably mention that I did make it to Powell's. And since the joint offices of the Police Bureau and the Portland Business Alliance, the folks who pay for all those rent-a-cops who are there to roust homeless people, punk kids, and street performers, are a few blocks from Powell's I went by there and rang there buzzer. After all, they say that their purpose is to prevent street crime and harassment, right? This is a chance for them to do what they want all that money and extra-legal authority for. So I waited a few minutes. Rang it again. Nothing. Silly me. Why would I think that they actually cared about somebody who wasn't pre-approved and waving a check?

Now, just to be clear, I don't think that the officers have anything to apologize for. What I think is that this is a perfect example of what I've been seeing about Portland for a while. 911-focused systems are only but so good at fighting crime. And what crime they do address is largely after the fact or, at best, when people are already hurt. If you want to prevent crime, you goddamn well get cops out on the streets. And you motivate them to talk to people, to learn the habits of the people in the area, especially the kind who make a habit of threatening violence, and, I'll bet, being violent if they think they can get away with it.

Are you seeing the recent articles about police departments cutting travel by their officers? I am. Departments across the country are responding to rising gas prices by telling their employees to not leave the station as much, to try to limit vehicle use to things like emergency response and prisoner transfer. They're not supposed to go to as many training courses (!) or meetings, or any other non-emergency behavior that requires leaving the building at all.

This looks to me like this is a mighty good time to increase the number of cops on bikes. And on foot. It would sure as hell cut down on the consistently sky high rates of heart disease among officers. And if you've seen some of the holds and attacks they learn to do with their bikes these days, dude, those things are transportation, weapon, armor, gear holder, and restraint, all in one shiny package. And, hey, pretty much all the bike cops get seriously buff and I'm always up for having more good-looking people in my city.

As for what we have now, I never see cops on foot on, for example, 82nd Avenue. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing a cop on foot at all in this city except for downtown, right around Pioneer Courthouse Square. I periodically hang out in a neighborhood called "Felony Flats" and I sure don't see them there. Why not? It's not that sparsely populated and the commercial strips have people on them until well after midnight. The taco truck the way out at the county line is still doing business 'til quite late. And I could rattle off over a dozen other areas in this city just like it.

So where are the cops? I see plenty of meth heads here and there. I see clusters of seedy-looking kids harassing passersby near the apartment complexes out past 90th Avenue. I hear belligerent drunks in the bars in St. John's. I encounter all sorts of people who, among other things, keep people in their cars and limit the viability of mass transit and pedestrian access.

Okay, I will admit, I have seen cops on foot doing two things - impeding exercise of free speech, and working big, corporate-funded events. Plenty of them were on hand on Alberta one day last summer to block off the street and prevent an arts-oriented parade that most of the passersby were applauding. (I joined the parade, fwiw.) There were dozens of them standing around at the Rose Festival. Quite literally dozens. Mostly in big clusters away from where the visitors were. But walking the streets? No such luck.

Back in the early nineties even my rather high tolerance level for street mahooah was running out. (Trying to get my then girlfriend to move in with me despite periodic bouts of nearby machine gun fire wasn't working out too well) So, after a few brief chats at the local precinct, I went to a really good briefing there about our rather rowdy neighbors. Over the next two years this bunch of gun-happy individuals were pretty much taken out of the equation, and both the briefing then and everything I've heard from NYPD sources and the press since agree that a key role in this was played by having cops out on the street. Walking the blocks, talking to the people on the stoops, helping out with the drunk who needed to be settled down, the homeless guy threatening people as they got out of the subway, and so on.

If you want to get the serious bad guys, you want to know their ecosystems. If you want to make the streets safe, you have to get uniforms on the streets. Not just when a call comes in; all the time. And if we're going to catch the young violent twits like my conversational partners from a few hours back while they're still young enough to have some chance of becoming healthy, positive members of society, then we need to know about them and deal with them  before they knife or shoot or otherwise seriously attack somebody.

Do I still want to break their kneecaps and then have a little chat about proper public behavior? Well, duh. But I would rather hear that somewhere out there is a sane, trained, well-supported team of cops who know their names, know their habits, and are on their way to doing something that will keep somebody else from having to put up with tomorrow what I did today.

-Rustin

* for the record, about five-eight, short red hair, narrow jaw, angular body, prominent cheekbones, small goatee, late teens or early twenties.

his sidekick - about five six, brown hair to his shoulders, round face, clean-shaven, mid-teens.

So now the MTA board will NEVER ride the subways. Spiffy.

In yet another bout of lunkheaded headline whoring, various New York State government officials have created a "controversy" about the fact that members of the MTA board have had the right to unlimited travel on all MTA-run systems, from highways and bridges using EZ-Pass to subways, buses, commuter rail, and so on.

So now, on the grounds that this is a "perk" and that board members are supposed to serve without any compensation whatsoever, this right has been revoked. Because, obviously, the seventeen board members who are responsible for a SEVERAL HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR system (think about it, add up what it would cost to rebuild all of the infrastructure the MTA is responsible for and the impact this infrastructure has on the world's economy) are "wasting money" if they are allowed two or three hundred dollars worth of access a year to the system they are supposed to be seeing as much of as possible.

So, let's say that each one of them, once in their time as board members, makes a single decision better because of something they learned from riding in the system one more time because of the previous policy. What is the return on investment of that? A hundred to one? A thousand to one?

And we all know that the board members serve purely out of their selfless desire to help the people and that making policy on this assumption is a good idea. Maybe we should extend this policy out and declare that all government-related jobs and responsibilities should be unpaid and utterly uncompensated. That'll work. Really. I promise.

I am so frickin' glad that I don't live in New York anymore. When it comes to state government, those people are goddamn well diseased.

A tiny update on USPS vehicles

Haven't spoken to anybody official yet, but on further examination I've noticed that here in Portland, while there are indeed lots of new looking USPS minivans around, here, unlike Minneapolis, they're a mix of Chevys and Ford Windstars. I've also noticed that at least some of them look a bit customized, with police cruiser style stripped wheels. I have no idea of what it means, but since it's a bit different from what I wrote a month ago, I thought that it was worth clarifying.

Hopefully next week I'll have cool stuff to say about the new WES that a Tri-Met tech told me is currently sitting in Wilsonville but until I've made it down there to look it over with my own geeky eyes, I'll keep mum.

Yet Another Reason to Go Vegan (Kinda).

I love food. I love to eat, to cook, and even to shop. But only on my terms and schedule. So I've never had meat around much; it just goes bad in the fridge too fast. Same for milk. I'm a stock up once, not shop again for weeks kinda guy.

Well, now I live near Food Fight, a munchies-rich, convenience food-oriented, vegan emporium, and in recent months I've been dropping by periodically and picking up this and that, partially just because they're the closest source of things like hummus that I would be buying anyway and partially to try out some of these new vegan substitutes for my usual choices. And by jiminy, I'm loving having stuff around that doesn't go bad anywhere near as fast.

This applies across the board. Not just to stuff from Food Fight, but to vegan stuff in general. I've taken to buying soy milk at the dollar store because I can just shove a few boxes in the cupboard and leave them there as long as I want, unlike milk, except for that Parmalat stuff that costs three times as much and tastes awful.

I admit that in principle, I've been wanting to cut my meat intake way down for years simply for environmental and health reasons. And, yes, I admit it, because it seems like every cute woman I meet turns out to be vegetarian, at the least. The things that have been stopping me are price and that, I'm sorry, but a lot of vegan stuff just doesn't satisfy me. I eat it and am left asking myself, "okay, now what are we having for dinner?"

Well, here are some foods that have been satisfying me just fine:

Vegan Black Pepper Steaks - these are excellent for making a home version of beef with broccoli and I found that one 10.5 ounce package is several meals worth of "meat". Cheap at the price.

Field Roast (assorted varieties) - This stuff is great. Makes really good sandwiches and has a solid, spicy, hearty taste to it. I like that they don't try to imitate particular kinds of animal. And that it's made in the Pacific Northwest.

Vegan Grated Topping (Parmesan Flavor) - I use this stuff just like Parmesan and while it may not be as good as the best real cheese, it's sure better than most of the grated Parmesan sold in supermarkets. And one little container is lasting me months. By the way, click on the nutrition link and check out the calorie numbers. Zero fat ftw!

Proper Eats Cafe - I so wish that they weren't all the way out in St. Johns! These folks are amazing. Everything that I've ever eaten there has been excellent. Not only that, they're one of the only restaurants I've ever been to which can make an entire meal without using anything that I'm allergic to and have it taste great. If only they would turn the volume down when they have bands sometimes but that's a quibble. If you're ever up in their neck of the woods, I seriously recommend trying them out.

And another which isn't vegan-specific but related is Organics To You, which delivers a big whoppin' box of fresh veggies to my door every two weeks. My oh my has this changed my eating habits. And it cost about ten bucks a week. Check it out.

Anyway, I'm not about to give up my occasional burger, let alone my fish sauce or my meat dumplings. But I've gotta admit, as the new approaches to food preparation get better and better, I'll probably turn to the meatless options more and more.

Which is a good thing.

-Rustin

When will we see ships built of ice?

During World War II a fellow by the name of Max Perutz invented a simple thing. He added wood pulp to water and froze it. The resulting material was massively strong, easy to work and damn near impossible to sink. And, by the way, takes forever to melt.

I'm not going to go on at length about this. At least not today. Wikipedia and the web do just fine. The only thing to be sure to remember is that slow melting rate and the vast volume to surface ratio of a large ship. One of these made during the winter in China would do just fine getting a cargo to the United States. Admittedly, biomass isn't anywhere near the waste product it was then but still, what is the invested energy to make one of these relative to building a ship out of steel?

Start by reading this. Then read the Wikipedia entry here and wander around Googleland a bit.

And ask yourself, why the everliving hell don't we have these yet?

-Rustin

Thrifty Living Trick 1: Berry Tea

In every city I know there is at least one market in a poorer part of town that sells pretty much good veggies for quite good prices. Maybe they're not as ripe as they could be; maybe they're a bit beat up. But if you're living cheap and you've got the time they can be very useful.

Last week I went to such a market here in Portland and bought a big bag of assorted produce, including three seventy-nine cent containers of berries. Well, a couple of days later, as I was starting a batch of iced tea, I took the first blackberry from a package and discovered that they really weren't sweet enough to eat. No problem.  My normal tea recipe these days is to put two pu-erh teabags, vanilla and simple syrup in about two liters of boiling water that I just took off the heat, let everything mix and cool, pour it into a pitcher, and add water to taste when I drink it. So I just added the berries to my pan of hot water and boiled them for about five minutes before adding my tea makings .

Ambrosia.

So just remember, the next time you have some raspberries or equivalent that turned out to be too sour to munch, put them in boiling water for just a few minutes with vanilla (I'm partial to Mexican vanilla), the sweetener of your choice, and then a few tea bags as it cools and you'll have a pitcher of summer goodness. Personally, I'll be using this trick with some of the vast quantities of blackberries that cover Portland in mid-summer. Gives me a reason to freeze a few more baggies worth for use later in the year.

Note: This post is the first of what I expect will be a continuing series. In a few months my press will be putting out a guide to living an elegant life on a tiny budget. These posts are my way of working out the last few bits before I finalize the manuscript, do layout, and go to press.

The robust lifecycle of modern disinformation.

My friend Interrobang just sent me a clip on greenhouse effect "sceptics" that got me thinking.

I'm starting to suspect that disinformation in the modern world has a consistent life cycle.

First it gets a free ride. Not only because, being fraud, it is designed to not be visible for what it is, but because our sort hold ourselves to a higher standard and, even having seen it, take the time to make sure that we haven't misunderstood and then yet more time to gather our arguments.

Then we silly rational people discover it and waste time trying to combat it with dry, unappealing reason nuggets propagated to a resistant public. Resistant, if nothing else, because modern disinformation is very effectively engineered to be something FUN to believe.

Then the disinformation campaign marginalizes, discredits, and otherwise undermines their opponents, usually with almost complete success. It can't possibly matter what we say. After all, we're just "hippies" and "commies" and "feminazis". Or even (gawd forbid) liberals.

And ONLY THEN do those fighting the disinformation start to fight fire with fire, using reason that has been a little more effectively dressed up in emotion, as the disinformation camp has been doing all along. Jon Stewart and his fellow public voices come to mind. But even then we tend to mostly just mock the messenger or the surrounding circumstances, leaving us far below parity since by then the lie spreaders have had ages to mock and undermine us. What we don't do is offer any equally compelling thing to take the place of what we're trying to take away.

So even then we almost never do any better than retaking some small part of their gains. Even then, we usually only get traction once the effects of the disinformation can be easily linked to unpleasant and recently worsening parts of people's lives with a cause and effect interval measured in weeks or less.

Remind me, please; how many people take up smoking a year?

We need to get better at this.

The only thing that occurs to me at the moment is one bit of in-your-faceness that I think we could stand to see more of.

It's time that we started asking:

Are you brave enough to face the truth?

Are you brave enough to admit that greenhouse effects will kill us if we don't act or are you such a wuss that you're just going to hide under your bed and expect people like me to do all the work?

Are you man enough to admit that sexism is a huge part of how corporations mess with us, a key tool (pun intended) in how they sell us crap like Hummers and the Iraq war?

Do you have the guts to face facts? To admit that our nation's infrastructure is disintegrating and that we not only need to do without much of the money in our pockets, we also need to change how we do things and live with massive shutdowns and reroutings while we build saner replacements?

Are you brave enough to admit that plenty of disabled people can do your job just fine and that you've been keeping them out largely because their difference makes you uncomfortable?

Do you have the stones to look yourself in the eye and admit that you don't really need most of what you own? That, in fact, much of what you spend your money on you don't even like all that much once the advertising-caused associations are taken away? Why did you pay forty dollars for a sweatshirt again? For a logo silkscreened on the front? Do you have the strength of will to admit that you've been turned into a delusional sucker and used like a crack whore? 

We need to work harder to give the average person emotional hooks to believe the truth. Because they sure as hell have them to stay deluded.

-Rustin