Wednesday, May 29, 2019

California is the stupidest place on Earth.

Days-long PG&E outages may be coming. Here's what to do if you lose power for days.

After the Northern California wildfires last year everybody decided - hey I know, let's not let that happen again. We will just preemptively shut off power to EVERYONE in a wind zone. It doesn't matter that this grinds the economy of that city to a complete halt. We don't want to harm any trees, so this is the only option. 

Of course this annoys me because, it isn't like the power grid is that stable now. I have a summer bug out plan because of bunnay. Bunnies can not pant, so they don't tolerate the 100 degree + temps we get in summer without AC. We have only had to go to a hotel once when we were out of power for three days. But every year I pick a hotel that is most likely to stay on the grid just in case.

Luckily the city next to me put up a hotel right next to the hospital. It's likely on the hospital grid and won't be shut down. But this is life in California.

As ridiculous it sounds, I'm rooting for this to happen. Just because I want to see what happens when people can't plug in their effing cars. And to see the teeth gnashing of solar owners who thought they were protected from power shut outages. Which is mostly not the case.

11 comments:

  1. I know this comments does not apply to you, but I always feel nothing but joy when leftards suffer from their own stupidity. Of course, they would rather blame Trump or corporations or some other such nonsense instead of recognizing the reality of the situation.

    I'm sure most Americans could not last more than a day or two without their debit card and I would guess few keep much cash around for an emergency.

    Also, I wish the New Yorkers and Californians would not move to Texas; please go back.

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  2. Aw. That's so sweet. I was pretty sure you and Texas Refugee started out here hate reading me. Then you guys somehow fell in love with my charming personality.

    If it makes you feel better some Californians do leave. I left. Spent a couple of years in Texarkana. Which was dry on Sundays. Thank goodness I lived on the border. Is that still a thing?

    But some of us can change. I was probably the type of Californian Texans hated. Since ya'll kept calling me a yankee. You'd love to have me now. If it weren't for your mosquitos I might try again. Well, that and the crazy water snakes. But I get a really crazy reaction to bug bites. Hey - do you guys still have lightening bugs? I didn't really become the way I am until I started making good money and paying big taxes which would be a couple years after I left.

    I admit, half of my brain wants to see this place burn. But then....that affects me. So I'm in a constant Disapproving Wonka
    state. Sometimes this place is too stupid for words.

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  3. Capital of Texas RefugeeWednesday, May 29, 2019 9:41:00 PM

    "... you and Texas Refugee ..."

    WOT? How did I get roped into this?

    I thought we'd established that I came here for the nifty cars before I decided I'd sell off my stupidly costly to insure fleet of vehicles ...

    Dry counties are still a thing, BTW.

    But drive-in beer stores are also still a thing.

    The drive-in beer store on Guadalupe ("Gwah-da-loop") in Austin is still also a thing.

    And I am a Capital of Texas Refugee, I'll have you know ...

    I considered moving back to Texas when I was heading out of Miami, but not to Austin: I was looking at moving to Lubbock, which would have put me near a better airport but not near the water.

    There were several other advantages, such as having a decent university nearby which might have been a good source for new people to hire.

    But I took a walk through Seaside and decided that I could stay in Florida, even with the gators and the "skeeters" ...

    And these fucking hard-to-kill bugs Floridians call "Palmetto bugs" that we used to call "tree roaches" in Austin, there are plenty of those, and they're a worse problem than the mosquitoes.

    Skeeters: I'mma gonna get up on your arm and you'll barely notice ...

    Palmetto bugs: I'M ALL UP IN YO CORNFLAKES AND RICE, SEE ME NOW BEEEETCH???

    So there's that. :-)

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  4. Yo, long time no see. And I see that after ten years plus this blog is still the same. That's pretty impressive. It's also impressive that the California you were complaining about back then is still chugging along. Same with the economy. Who knew you could just waive around a computer and conjure up trillions of dollars out of thin air and nobody would bat an eye? Must be nice work if you can get it.

    As for your old friend KS, all is more or less well in his world, thanks for asking! Just jiving along, doing his own thing. Plotting to take over the world, learning to converse in ancient Greek, that sort of thing. It's also sort of fun t watch the world go insane. "So, that's where you kids want to take things, is it? Not exactly what I would do, but the guy with the black robe and the sickle tells me it's not really my business, so lots of luck to you!"

    Speaking of which, KS wishes you and your bunny (and everybody else you care about) all the best in wacky CA. Hope the blog lasts until that fault finally gives way!

    All the best from you old amigo Keyser Söze

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  5. Capital of Texas RefugeeThursday, May 30, 2019 1:39:00 AM

    A Texan: "... I would guess few keep much cash around for an emergency ..."

    Then this is for you.

    It looks like any black leather belt you'd buy at a mall anywhere in North America, but it isn't.

    This thing holds up to fifty grand in folded-up foreign currencies (such as fifty 1000 Swiss Franc notes), five grand in US $100 bills, and about a grand and some change if you're sticking to US twenties.

    It does not hold plastic money well, such as the horrible plastic shit they're using in Canada where this thing is made.

    But there's also room for a folded up sheet with your IDs copied onto it, two luggage keys, a microSD card in a miniSD holder, and about eighteen Mexican 1945 two peso gold coins if you sandwich them in with all of the other stuff.

    I only keep about two hundred US in small bills in my wallet at any time.

    A little bit of an extra-better sewing job by a decent cobbler to secure the buckle will make this last a very long time.

    So I don't know who these people are who can't find $400 in emergency funds ...

    Buy a money belt, put extra money in money belt, eventually you have over $400 in your money belt.

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  6. If it isn't Keyser effin Soze. I didn't think I'd ever hear from you again. It's like seeing a ghost.

    But it makes me really happy you stopped by. The blog is still the same. No one can believe I'm still doing this. The wife, son and cats still doing okay?

    California is still the same - but we are still hoping for Fight Club, nothing can knock this shit into the sea. but at least if that happens, my shit will still be in the sea rather than three states over like hurricane country.

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  7. CaPital of TeXas Refugee - I'm sort of depressed about the car situation. I used to post some of the greatest stuff. Now everything is SUV this or Tesla that. It sucks a bag of dicks.

    I'm often not sure why some people stick to my blog. Sarcastic attitude only explains so much. So are you still in the States? I wasn't sure if you'd bugged out yet. Are you still bugging out?

    A Texan - what would it really matter if we carried cash? Walk into any store in the middle of a power outage and try to give them cash! We are all surfs.

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  8. "A Texan - what would it really matter if we carried cash? Walk into any store in the middle of a power outage and try to give them cash! We are all surfs."

    I do recall having to buy something during a power outage, and cash was the only thing that worked. I imagine a stranger would take cash.

    And yes, there are few dry county holdouts. Sadly, Texas has these archaic alcohol laws, so you can't buy hard liquor at the WalGreens for example. I believe this session the legislature is allowing craft breweries to sell their product from their premises.

    And we can't seem to get Constitutional carry despites a Republican governor. I believe CA at some point had more liberal gun laws that Texas in SOME respects, but I can't recall the details.

    I've been to SF and LA and Newport beach area. I like visiting, but I could not imagine wanting to live there. I enjoyed the Getty Art Museum and couple others. I405? was interesting. No thanks! :LOL:

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  9. I went into a Safeway once within the last year. It wasn't even a power outage - but for some reason their servers were rebooting. They would not take cash. I'm not even sure the kids these days know how to calculate tax and so forth. Finally after about five minutes of us all standing there like doofuses I'm like - how long does it take for your servers to reboot? They don't even have the the ability to record a cash order without the cash registers.

    I'm not saying you shouldn't carry cash, only that these days no one knows HOW to take cash without a machine telling them how to do so.

    There were a lot of things about Texas I loved. You could get stuck literally ANYWHERE and someone would come to get you out. If you were out in a bog somewhere and got stuck, some farmer would come out and get you with a tractor. I hope that still exists there. Coming from California it was just the most amazing thing. In California no one stops to help someone by the side of the road. In Texas that always seemed to happen.

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  10. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, May 31, 2019 12:59:00 PM

    "Walk into any store in the middle of a power outage and try to give them cash!"

    I had this happen in downtown Portland once many years ago -- power went out in the Pearl District and everything started to grind to a halt.

    Here's the thing: there's no sales tax in Oregon, so all people have to do is to add up what they have, meaning that this should be super easy.

    I had about ten bucks of stuff to buy, and I quickly added it up in my head, which I figured that people around me could still do ...

    Yeaaaaah, right.

    Just to help the shop owners clear out the dozen or so people who couldn't do math in their head, I quickly added up all of their stuff.

    "How come you're so good at math?"

    If you routinely deal with hard stuff all the time, the easy stuff is super easy. Stuff that should get you embarrassed on Jeff Foxworthy's fifth-grader show should really, really be easy for everyone.

    But it turns out that Wyoming, which has one of the lowest IQ averages in the country, has the highest average reading comprehension level ... at roughly that of a fifth-grader. Connecticut isn't far behind, and then there's a cluster around the middle of fourth grade, and a bunch of states (mostly Southeastern and Western) don't even come up to that.

    I've lived in Wyoming for a while, and I can't really say it's a high-tech anything. Even "WyoTech" is just a glorified operation for training mechanics rather than engineers.

    So I have to provide a bit of a reality check about these "jobs coming home" things coming out of the Trump admin ... why do many people think they're going to be qualified to work at them?

    There are certain reasons some changes are going to take about two years, and perhaps even longer, BTW ...

    If I can't expect to be able to pick up enough engineers for new projects, what should I do? Obviously the answer is to work around the problem, and I'm a big fan of "System D" instead of hoping for regulatory and government changes.

    So I can strip the IP out of some of the companies where it's mixed up with employment contracts and shove that into a mostly pure IP and patents holding company, just for starters. I can wind down the rest of the employee situations by encouraging these people to start their own companies, or figure out ways for them to buy out some of the existing ones, which I've already had a round of doing with the move to Florida.

    But since life in the US has devolved to the point to where it's becoming acceptable to have third-world power shutdowns as an "alternative" to doing the maintenance that's required for keeping everything running, that to me is a signal that the US isn't remaining competitive enough.

    I can literally move to any Caribbean island and get a power and utilities situation that is at least that good, and they have less regulatory bullshit and lower taxes.

    "That's totally unpatriotic and un-American!"

    I never said I ever was patriotic or unconditionally pro-American -- I'm an anarcho-capitalist who would rather be living in a libertarian oligarchy as one of the oligarchs.

    And this is nothing I can control, actually, since I have investors to answer to, and they are forcing some of these changes. But it's nothing I can control from another perspective, which is that I have no control over what US schools and universities decide to teach.

    They obviously don't make math skills stick all that well.

    I've interviewed people with advanced EE degrees who don't have ham radio licenses and who can't operate a soldering iron or heat gun to stick some components onto a prototype board.

    "SOIC, TSOP, do you know them, motherfucker?" :-)

    Hell, if they could operate a pancake griddle, they might have a start ...

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  11. The thing is - I see why it's happening. I am not good at math by any degree. My family told me I didn't need it. Seriously. But everyone carries a calculator around on their phones. If you just have ambition you can learn a lot of stuff. I sort of came by being somewhat mechanical by accident. Being an only child to an abusive mom I learned how to fix things to not get in trouble. Even if I didn't break "the" thing. If you don't have any siblings, there is no one to blame things on. So I started repairing Tv's and all sorts of things before I became a teen just so I didn't get a beating. And I'm telling you that without hyperbole. I spent a month in a children's shelter. Thats how ghetto my family was.

    So I see how we get this stupid. And I'm not even saying I'm smart. Being underestimated is the greatest freedom. If you do dumb stuff people think - yeah... that's about right. Which I still do. But these days with the internet and everything - it's just crazy how everyone isn't geniuses. It's just pure laziness and pear pressure.

    I loved your vid. That is an ~amazing~ hack. I love when people are scrappy like that.

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