Overly Complicated

Over my adult life I completed many construction or property improvement projects and learned what is plausible for me to do in a given amount of time with my current resources. I also see what approaches hold up over time. Stupidly simple things tend to persist, while something that's "engineered", meaning a complex arrangement of components is involved, will eventually fail.

I put a culvert and stream crossing on the service road into our woods . The culvert and road is holding up well because it's so simple. It's a huge pipe in a stream course covered with many tons of dirt and gravel. The culvert created an erosion problem, though on the downstream side. It's basically like a giant fire hose on very rainy days, so I built some erosion control measures as well, but those did not hold up well over time.

I stacked up dozens of bags of concrete to get the water to drop about 6 feet in controlled steps. I was hoping it would slow enough to deposit sand and gravel and eventually reshape the drop to a gradual slope. For several years, it actually worked. However, one big rain storm obliterated the "steps". Dozens of 80 pound blocks were pushed several yards down the stream. I'd probably need to pour the concrete in giant man-made boulders for it to really work. Basically it's not possible to maintain an "arranged" structure like that over such widely varying conditions. I notice in the stream beds that are adjacent to our property, only the fridge-sized boulders stay put. Almost every other rock eventually moves somewhere.

Over the past several weeks, I've been building a trail through the woods and contending with some muddy patches. Over the decades, people who owned the same property did as well, and they tried a handful of different solutions to the mud problem. Again, the simplest ones seem to be the best ones. The "planned" ones stink. For example, burying drainage pipe of various kinds is almost invariably bad. It will eventually fail and can't be repaired or even maintained and nobody will even know where it is. The easiest approaches, like digging a ditch to divert water from a path, or filling a low spot with rocks will last.

I built a couple of corduroy roads (logs or straight branches placed on muddy patches). Those work very well, even better than rocks or pavers in many cases, because rocks sink into the mud over not too many freeze/thaw cycles. The maintenance of the corduroy road is easy and inexpensive. Variations on that theme, like a bridge or elevated walkway are also pretty decent solutions, though they're more expensive and can be overly elaborate and fail-prone as well.

The Ghost Orchard

We have several acres of wooded land on our property. In some areas, mainly where the slope is steepest, the forest is old. There are some live trees that are probably hundreds of years old, plus the ground has many lumps and divots from similarly large tree root systems that fell in wind storms centuries ago and were never reworked by farm machinery.

Some areas are new growth forest and were possibly a former orchard. People cleared the trees, then mounded up the soil in long rows on the flat parts of the property then planted long gone apple trees (probably) on the mounds. Creating those mounds was probably a huge chore, even if they used machines for it, and it probably took several man months of effort.

Years later, that furrow/ridge system causes drainage issues because it blocks the natural flow of surface water for hundreds of feet. In some places it is a swamp during the winter and spring months and ironically is a tree graveyard because of the wet conditions.

I'm building a mountain bike trail on my property. Part of it goes through that ghost orchard area. It's been a labor and material intensive part of the trail because of the swampy soil, so I feel inclined to hate on the people who built those mounds. It's a bad idea to drive vehicles through fragile soil and damp areas because it makes the conditions even worse and it will turn into a mud bog. There are a couple of the furrows someone probably used as a tractor path many decades ago and it's still kind of a mess.

The ghost orchard is a good illustration of how an arbitrary imposed plan generally doesn't work out well. A more prudent approach would have been to build a pilot project, see how it worked out, then incrementally built it out. I'm guessing, though, that the ghost orchard was built out all at once and then maybe failed and was left to go wild. People do that because of math and money. They think, "I will get X trees per 100 feet of ridges, which will yield Y dollars of sales." Then they build out the whole area to try to maximize revenue. The numerous problems might not show up for a couple of years. 

Precious Metals

Gold and silver prices are at all time highs and moving up almost every day. The "price" reflects a variety of factors and nobody knows which factor contributes what to the price. For example, the US dollar is being systematically devalued, which shows up in the price, but there's also a component of FOMO speculation from people who will move onto something else in a random period of time.

Gold is pretty useful for maintaining purchasing power of your savings. One big advantage is it's portable. Right now a pound of gold is closing in on $100,000. A cell phone weight of gold (200 grams) is about $30,000 of purchasing power. If you had to suddenly flee and wanted to take some purchasing power with you, you could easily do it with gold. Or if you wanted to make a major purchase, it would be easy to do it with gold... if we had a precious metals based system.

Silver is much less portable, so it's proportionately less useful for transactions. Silver is closing in on $70 per troy ounce. A cell phone weight of silver is about $450 right now. It would be useful for buying groceries or regular daily life transactions, which was its main use for centuries.

The price of silver in US $ was stagnant for many years. All through the early 2000s silver was $15-20/troy ounce. There are lots of people with many pounds of silver piled up in a safe or trunk or something because of the 2008 financial crisis or 2000 dot com implosion.

 

The main downside of precious metals is the US financial system is funny money based and there's a lot of waste associated with moving in and out of the funny money system. You pay a premium to convert your paper money to gold and pay a premium changing back from gold to funny money. The premium to buy gold is about 6% now, which is absurd. The premium to sell varies quite a lot but can be high.

The banking system is really hostile to gold and silver because it's competition. The banking system has a monopoly on numbers that it zealously guards through corruption and violence. The US government is in on it. At some point, the US government will charge a huge tax on gold and silver sales and throw know your customer rules at anyone who does gold/silver exchanges because the US government is trash and bankrupt. They'll probably do that before they rob people's 401(k) accounts but that's inevitable too.

A good way to look at the banking system, or the government is those people are all in competition to be the king of hell. That is, they're the Hades/Pluto/Sauron archetype. There's a lot of libertarian types who imagine gold and silver help them escape that sort of tyrant or the corrupt hell/death system, but a piece of metal is pretty firmly in the world of dead stuff. Metal took the place of stuff like seeds or slaves in the ancient world.

There's a lot of good reasons to rotate out of gold and silver if you have a hoard purchased at early 2000s USD valuation. Convert it to chickens or tools, or maybe long-term maintainable cars from the 90s up to the early 2010s.

Pockets of Competents

I'm in my 50s now and I've lived among a handful of different cohorts of people. The type of people I grew up with and now live around are weirdly, consistently "competent". The neighbors I have, for example, are high-end competent people in their work and hobbies. One of my neighbors is a blacksmith as a retirement hobby, plus he also designed and built his home and used to be a VP at a tool company. Another of my neighbors has a bunch of excavating equipment, but he's a high-end tech guy at a local tech company.

Most of the people I grew up with are like those dudes. They had a job, but also are good at hobby stuff or general life skills. They can fix anything in their house, their car, whatever. Even if they aren't super handy and hands-on they know enough to make decisions about paying a contractor.

As I lived with and interacted with different cohorts of people in my adult life, I came to realize that high functioning, high competence people are rare, and the high-competence generalist types are unicorn rare. A more common high competence type is a specialist who doesn't know about anything else. For example, a person might be a doctor, or a scientist with a PhD in some science field, but they don't understand or know anything about plumbing in a house. In fact, they have a lot of pride in their ignorance and imagine they're a "prince" or "princess" who can't be bothered to know about a septic tank or house wiring.

It's manifestly obvious to me now that those generalist competent people are the best to live near or work with. That habit of understanding all the things is associated with humility. An arrogant, status seeker type will imagine that it's "beneath them" to do manual labor, if you pile up a bunch of those people in the same place, you'll get major dysfunction and unchecked corruption and endless malinvestment.

If those generalist competent people understood "we're rare" they could all get together consciously. My neighborhood, though, happened through an "unconscious" sorting process. I got here through a few criteria. Low tax. Lots of land. Few neighbors. Low regulation. Relatively high property price. Remove any of those criterion, and it'd be a different mix of people. Like, remove high property price and maybe you get rednecks instead of gentleman farmer types, or add high regulation and you get the suburban housecat type of people who are more likely to be the specialist type.

Ford $19B EV "Writedown"

Ford recently announced it's EV project is a failure. They're planning to "pivot" to AI datacenter energy storage in hopes of riding that hype wave after then "netzero" EV hype wave ran out of gas a couple of years ago. As part of that they are taking a "writedown" of $19B, whatever that means.

A few years ago the narrative was "EV's are inevitable" for various handwaving reasons. Many reality based observers understood there are huge problems associated with trying to switch the entire transportation fleet to battery power. Many executives at car manufacturers didn't. Are they stupid? Yes. They're stupid, delusional people who were insulated from consequences usually since birth.

"AI" suffers from the same problems. "Bitcoin" and "blockchain" suffer from similar problems. We really don't live in a world of endless plenty. There's endless ideas and endless funny money, but pretty harsh limits on the system. Burning resources to run a bureaucratic system is really foolish.

The economy has some inherent physical limit on energy production. In the US per-capita energy consumption has been constant for many years. There's no new source of energy. People get more efficient with energy use (like better insulation, LED lighting, etc...) instead of building new, very expensive infrastructure. The idea the overall economy can be re-allocated to build out a new grid with additional capacity is probably a crack-pipe dream. Here's an old post: "The 20 Kilowatt Lifestyle"

The current system runs flat out to support the 10-13 kilowatt lifestyle. Trying to reallocate resources to achieve the 20 kilowatt lifestyle is probably impossible barring some major new, portable energy source.

I think the "pockets of competents" future is the next big thing.

"Costs" are Mostly Fake

A few years ago, I noticed that Amish neighborhoods are loaded with small businesses. There are woodworking shops, lumber yards, engine repair, welding shops, greenhouses, jam and jelly producers, plus retail shops in the Amish community that's about 20 miles from my house. Many Amish can apparently afford to have a business that only intermittently brings in revenue because they aren't operating on credit for the most part.

Reportedly, Amish tend to pay off debts like a mortgage as quickly as possible. Back around 2010 I decided to follow that model. We paid off our mortgage on our current property and now have no debt and there is a corresponding drop in cost of living, and my "need" for an income is greatly reduced.

Now marginally productive, revenue generating projects are purely positive. For example, we have chickens and ducks and sell eggs through our neighbor's egg stand. In recent years I sold garlic and pumpkins from the garden. Those activities are absurdly easy. I put a table by the road with a money box. People take the stuff and leave wads of cash or quarters.

There's not really any need to calculate an "ROI" or see if there's a net gain or net loss with those activities because we don't have any outside obligations. We don't need to squeeze productivity out of the chickens or ducks either so they get to live a royal life. It would be difficult for us to generate much revenue from the roadside stand though and that market would saturate quickly. I know the market is surprisingly large: many people exclusively buy eggs from farmstands because it's a much more sensible option than buying from the grocery store so all the egg stands along my road sell out 100% of the time. However, I don't know the full extent, but it might only be like $2000 a year. Also past a certain point, more infrastructure would be required.

"Costs", really debts are what keep people running on the hamster wheel of life. "The System" is a bunch of people running on hamster wheels on behalf of bankers and other parasites who in turn are heavily indebted to others to support their life.

Gameified Reality and Bizarre Ideology

When people are acting "naturally", that is mostly unconsciously by following long standing customs, or according to manifest common sense, they're acting "freely", that is unencumbered by the need to adhere to "rules". That scenario might not be utopian, nor result in relationships that are fair and stress free, by the way. The strong can dominate the weak. Cheaters can prosper, etc... However, there's not a lot of overhead cost associated with that scenario. There's minimal officialdom, bureaucrats, etc... because there's no regulation. The "frontier" in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries was like that

By contrast, authoritarians often force people to "believe" various weird, anti-nature, nonsense ideas and religions. This is often associated with very heavy bureaucracy or rule by force. During the Reformation period, for example, some regions or cities in Europe came to be dominated by cults where, it seemed, the main goal of whatever government apparatus came to be was intent on making citizens take part in particular christian sectarian beliefs and practices.

The "leftist" ideology in the US is like that today. It's at war with nature and easy going, laissez-faire life. Several states in the US institutionalized leftist ideology in law and corporate catechisms of the HR department. It's mysterious to me how that continues and actually expands every year. In the early 90s the concept was basically "be nice to women at work" and today it's "make sure you know the pronouns of the 0.1% of the population who cares about such nonsense or you'll get fired".

The United States founding is much different than other nations. It consciously enshrines the tension of "positive laws" (or gamified reality or rules) and "nature's laws". The Declaration of Independence is the real founding document of the US and is a brief statement of the nature of things, then the constitution is nested inside of that and represents a mere paper agreement.

The gamifiers, authoritarians, religious schemers throughout history attempt to capture the natural man and put him to work for them. Generally the natural man gets tired of it after a while, which can be a very long time.