Cheapest Possible Road

A few years ago the "Cleveland Area Mountain Biking Association" and Geauga County Parks built a mountain bike trail at the park that adjoins my property. I've been a road cyclist/amateur racer since 1990, but never really got into MTB, because of the lack of trails. Now that there's a trail a mile from my house, I can ride over there in a few minutes and do a lap any time the trail is open, so I've been going a few times a week, weather permitting.

One of the things that's interesting to me about MTB is that people got very skilled at making trails over the years that there have been mountain bikes--really only about 40 years now. A small crew of volunteers, mainly, built and maintain about 6 miles of what's essentially a "road" through the woods. The trail contends with stream crossings, drainage, very steep climbs and descents without intensive use of materials.

The cost per mile is not zero, but it's probably as close as you could get to zero. It's not built for a practical purpose, so it twists and turns all over the place, climbs and descends needlessly, goes over bumps and jumps and difficult terrain on purpose to make the route interesting for riders and to pack 6 miles of trail into a 600 acre park. If it were built for practical transportation and utility, the path and approach would be somewhat different but it would be really usable. A person could get from A to B pretty easily over a $0 road.

The way "the system" works is apparent when you contemplate things like the transportation network. The transportation network tends to be completely replaced at each major iteration. For example, once there were trains, the canal and stagecoach era in northeast Ohio went away over the course of a couple of decades. In the car/truck era the trains routes collapsed to a minimal network.

A fairly large amount of the total production of "the system" is spent on the transportation network. The sub-components of the network all fit together. To use a certain tire composition, a certain wheel size, certain vehicle ground clearance implies a certain road surface, gradients, etc... All that leads to a certain cost per mile, which leads to a certain road density for a given population, and so on. This aggregate "solution" is arrived at incrementally over time and basically by accident, or via a process of mass trial and error. The solution is not optimal, plus the "optimal" scenario will change all the time.

Don't Do

Anything a man builds begins decaying and falling apart the instant its finished, even if it's not used. For example if you make something out of wood, UV radiation, fungi, mold, water start wearing away at it immediately. Even durable building materials start to crumble and fall apart once exposed to the elements and arranged in a man-made pattern, like perfectly square and plumb concrete walls or stone walls.

It doesn't take many years for untreated wood to start to fall apart once it's exposed to the elements. Stuff that performs some function, like a road, gets destroyed by traffic and the elements. As the footprint of all the stuff expands, more and more resources and human time and energy are consumed to try to keep it "alive".

The amount of time and energy that goes into maintaining various things people take completely for granted, like on demand electricity, is staggering. A few years ago I observed maintenance of high voltage power lines from Perry Nuclear Power Plant. The lines and insulators and other hardware are replaced on a regular schedule. Every single tower carrying the power lines is periodically repainted and concrete piers are repaired and replaced. Work crews travel around the country performing that demanding and expensive task.

When we moved to our current property, I started building out farm infrastructure every spring and summer. The first year I built a small woodshed. Then I built a garden fence, an enclosure for ducks and chickens, a greenhouse... but soon I realized each new building was not only consuming money and resources for materials to be built, but would be a future drain of time and money for maintenance while producing only a modest amount of food. I pulled the plug on my plans for building a big barn and other infrastructure with the same approach.

The traditional method for analyzing these projects is to look at productivity improvement of some tool or infrastructure versus the costs involved. The "measure" of productivity is typically money, however, that's a bad measure. When "real" terms are used, like energy or materials, there's probably no positive return ever. It's all consumption. Higher "productivity" just consumes more faster with maybe fewer hands involved. That's a bitter pill to swallow.

In the natural system terms, it's really only possible to rearrange the annual flow of sunlight and use materials that nature provides. Living in the context of the natural system generally leads to a "don't do" mentality, a concept that is core to Masanobu Fukuoka's farming methods.

Almost any piece of technology or infrastructure you might look at will fail the "should I do it" test when real terms are used. A couple of basic questions a person might ask about a given piece of tech or infrastructure: "does it really save energy or time of an actual person?" and "does it save energy or time in aggregate?" Almost any project will fail those questions.

Nuclear Subsidies for Tech Bros

The feds announced taxpayers will fund 10 nuclear power plants for tech bros. There won't be as many tech bro yacht club members if the AI bubble pops, so it's a "national emergency". This was telegraphed some time ago. I think the most plausible explanation for this nonsense is the central bank parasite wants to use crypto currency and AI as part of the next monetary/slave system.

Nuclear power is the most expensive, longest lead time, etc... form of electricity generation. The fixation on nuclear power is weird. I can imagine the psycho death cult that seems to run all the institutions in the world might want to literally exterminate every living thing with some kind of mass nuclear meltdown or some shit.

None of the current mania makes any sense at all.

People Systematically Buying Older Cars

I recently thought about buying a 1990s Jeep Cherokee. They're a simple 4x4 car with a reliable engine and transmission. The engines and transmissions can be rebuilt, so they're viable "forever" cars. I started scanning different web sites for rust free ones. The prices are ridiculous, but they're all selling. It's about $10k minimum for a decent example. I imagine by the time it's brought up to daily driver level, the all in cost is closer to $20k.

To me that seems insane, but when I look at newer model used truck prices, I see why it's happening. A high mileage, 10+ year old Tacoma is listing for around $20k. It will have similar problems to an even older Jeep and require multiple thousands of repairs, potentially, to bring it to daily driver reliability.

When you compare those vehicles to a new truck, though, the $20k is a significant "savings" versus a new car. The average new car "price" is about $50,000 today. Most people are making a $700+ payment every month--for their entire life!--to go from A to B. The used car is likely to appreciate in price (not value) as the dollar is obliterated while the new car is a guaranteed loss of several tens of thousands of dollars. The used car is still pretty expensive to own and operate but it's probably 50% or less per trip versus a new car. 

The entire society is slowly shifting away from the trash that control the economy and government. I think the managerial/financial economy is in its first stages of failure and replacement. I see first hand, day to day, that it doesn't work. It's a good question why anyone should work for it.

Are They Actually Going to Invade Venezuela?

It seems like DC is trying to conjure up an excuse to invade Venezuela. How bizarre. I never would have guessed such a thing would happen. They're really trying to sell it though. I can't imagine the Trump administration would have any support for it. Much of the "right" in the US is anti-interventionist and anti-empire. There's not that many magatard boomers. Nobody will believe any pretext those liars in the government try to sell.

1930s Neglected Fridge Still Works

Every once in a while I watch videos from YouTuber "Mustie" who does car repair and random stuff repair videos. He just did a video about a Westinghouse fridge from the 30s that still runs, and is still quite usable. It required mainly a cleaning and some minor electrical repairs, even the seals on the fridge were intact after 90 or so years. An old "consumer" product is significantly more durable than a modern version. Generally new products are engineered to be "just good enough" and so they are more prone to fail and the overall system promotes their replacement rather than repair.

The financial and insurance industry in the US steadily turned everything into garbage at least since the federal reserve system started. Fractional reserve debt money is a serious problem for all the nominally "western" countries. It's basically systematized rot and rust because perverse incentives seem to dominate every large institution. The core issue is the accumulation of currency isn't the same as accumulation of wealth or any true good. A related issue is bureaucracy and overhead grow to absorb money like fungus and mildew. Similarly, the population is turning into incompetent retards because the system is predatory and wants prey.

Another side effect of the consumer/corporate system is individual and small business capabilities are higher than ever because of the profusion of material goods. For example, back in the 90s I worked at a company that made plasma and oxy cutting tables... At the time it was a somewhat exotic piece of equipment that was used in what was essentially heavy industry. Today its a ubiquitous consumer level item. There are portable versions that a hobbyist can use to cut precise and elaborate parts with a robot arm.

There's so much stuff out there that it's entirely plausible to never buy any new consumer product, but still live the generic "American" lifestyle by remanufacturing all the consumer goods and maximize value and reliability.

Formula for Future Success

Human life is pretty simple.

A man only need a few things: clean water, food, basic shelter. Everything else is a "want".

The "human system" is embedded in the nature system. The nature system runs on second hand sunshine. Since the sun is distributed fairly evenly over the earth's surface there's a profusion of forms of life. The nature system also runs on opposed forces that create conditions of dynamic equilibrium, so everything in nature runs in cycles.

The human system is mainly a product of the verbal and symbolic mode of consciousness. A thing like a city is a great example of that. The city attempts to expunge the natural system from its footprint and imposes grids and concrete and asphalt.

The further humans or an individual moves from the natural order, the more precarious is their situation. Consider a body builder who pumps huge amounts of roids into his or her system to build muscle for some bizarre fetishistic reason--the muscle man concept exists only in his or her mind. The body which is the epitome of a dynamic equilibrium system, is pushed far out of the natural and balanced scenario to an extreme, so it fails early, or organs fail, or cancers develop, etc... The image of the muscle man kills off the pile of 'roid muscle growth.

A collection of individuals acting the same way ends up with similar results. An attempt to force a region way out of dynamic equilibrium leads to a precarious situation. Relying on far flung infrastructure to deliver water to millions of people who decide to live in a desert climate like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Israel, etc... is a great example of that. All those cities, and most cities and collections of humans in some corporate endeavor are associated with and endless demand of "wants".

The amount of time and energy that goes into the pursuit of "wants" is staggering. The collective time and energy of everyone in the western world has poured into building a giant garbage pile of consumer products for quite a long time. None of it is durable. In fact, as time goes by consumer products get worse and more wasteful.

It seems plausible that aligning human activity and wants with the natural order would lead to a more durable scenario for an individual. The "problem" in that case is contending with the mass of depraved crazy people in general, and in government in particular. The government and the crazy mass basically wants everyone else to work as slaves to fulfill their wants.

The 401(k) is the best example of that insanity. The mass of people implicitly wants corporate profits to grow so they can live on financial gains, but depend on corporations for jobs and goods. They are a slave that everyone else to be a slave.

Fortunately for the man who wants out, the mass of crazy people won't even see the path toward the natural order life. The natural order life is basically the anti-matter version of the merchant.