Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:20 on 30 July 2022

If you diss manufactured housing, one of the standard responses you get is that there is no intrinsic reason for it to be low-end housing, and that quality, high-end manufactured housing is totally possible to make. In fact, there are already a few niche companies producing it.

The problem is that it is only a few niche companies and that this seems unlikely to change.

You see, the fact that it is theoretically possible for there to be quality manufactured housing doesn’t matter so much when it comes to choosing a home. What matters is the sort of manufactured housing that actually exists. And that is overwhelmingly low-end, low-quality housing.

Because of this, many zoning codes and neighbourhood covenants ban manufactured housing. The only places one can readily place it are either (a) more remote, rural areas with fewer regulations, and (b) mobile home parks.

More remote, rural areas inevitably have limited economic opportunities. They can be great places to live if you are self-employed and in a long-term relationship. If you are single, or if you work for someone else, they tend to suck. It doesn’t matter that they tend to be cheap places to live in: they are cheap for a reason; market prices of rural housing are kept low by the low incomes in rural areas. Evaluated in the light of the income one is likely to earn, those low rural prices suddenly cease to be a good deal.

Mobile home parks have rented lots. Yes, there are a few condo or coop mobile home parks which are owned either individually or collectively by their residents. Those are the exceptions to the rule. In most areas, all the mobile home parks will be owned by capitalists. In most areas, there is no rent control, so those capitalists can charge basically whatever they want for rent.

Sure, there’s market constraints on that, but those are imperfect. Suppose a shortage of mobile home sites develops in a given market. Lot rents will then tend to go up. If the shortage is severe, they will go up a lot. Or maybe decades of urban growth will turn what had been a relatively isolated, exurban park into a prime suburban area, ripe for redevelopment into a shopping center. In that case, its owner can cash out and make a huge wad by jacking the rent sky-high, driving his tenants away, and selling the resulting vacant land.

What happens then? If you have lived in your home for any length of time, you’re screwed. You see, most mobile home parks also ban older mobile homes. Why shouldn’t they? Remember, manufactured housing tends to be low-end and not built to last. Again, it doesn’t have to be, but practically it tends to be. Old mobile homes are therefore inevitably shoddy, dilapidated mobile homes. Nobody wants those moving in.

In other words, your lot rent goes up more than you can afford, and you have to walk away from the asset you spent a huge chunk of your net worth purchasing. If you had rented an apartment, you would have at least been able to pack your shit and git without leaving anything behind.

What it all means is that manufactured housing in the USA is in large part a scam that plays on the desperate (namely, people who really want a home of their own but who cannot really afford one and who fail to think long-term about the possible drawbacks of the decision they are making).

Published at 15:47 on 18 December 2021

Why blow a chunk of change on a brand-new camping stove when I already have a perfectly fine old Coleman stove? Two main reasons:

1. I may want to do some short-distance backpacking or medium-distance bicycle camping, and the old Coleman is way too large and heavy to be practical for car camping.
2. CSA certification. The Province of British Columbia can be very strict about its outdoor burn bans. Not any old camp stove is exempt; the strictest burn bans allow only stoves with modern safety certifications.

The second one is the real stickler. The chances are remote of there being any issues, but suppose the worst does happen and my old Coleman stove malfunctions and erupts in a ball of flame that ignites a wildfire. Once the authorities find I am in breach of their regulations, I am suddenly on the hook for the full costs of that fire. Just way too risky.

Although those old Coleman suitcase stoves have a time-tested safety record, a fifty year old stove is just not going to have a modern safety certification. Even if it could pass a modern inspection (and I believe it could) the cost of certifying it would be way beyond the means of an individual. Far cheaper and simpler to just buy a new stove.

Because I dislike the waste and poor cool-temperature performance of disposable canisters, that means a liquid-fuel stove. The Dragonfly is one of the few currently-manufactured (by a well-known, reputable manufacturer, with full safety certification) liquid-fuel stoves that can do more than just a quick boil; its burner is designed to simmer well.

Just did a test burn (if the stove doesn’t work, I want to find out in the garden outside, not in the backwoods). First impressions:

1. The thing is loud. They are called roarer burners for a reason.
2. It is significantly fiddlier than the old Coleman. Both require set-up and tear-down but the Dragonfly requires more of it; it is not as much all in one convenient unit. Part of this is just the price to pay for it being more compact and light-weight.
3. Lighting process is different, but not appreciably more or less convenient than the Coleman one. No liquid-fuel stove lights as easily as a gas kitchen stove (and due to the more complex process of burning liquid fuel, none ever will).

Since it’s just a quick test burn, I don’t have as much to report on how well it simmers, but I’m not really worried about that, either. I did use a friend’s Dragonfly once about five years ago, and from what I remember it simmered just fine. Plus, it has a good reputation for being able to do this.

Why buy it now? Supply chains. Was going to buy one as a birthday present to myself last year, but they were unobtainable, and remained so for months. I would not be shocked to see a similar disruption as the next camping season approaches.

The short summary is that it’s not going to completely replace the old Coleman, but it will be nice to have.

Published at 11:12 on 22 May 2020

Here’s a mystery: why is bulk rice still in such short supply?

I could understand pre-packaged rice being in short supply, because of how the shortages have been created: virtually overnight, everyone has stopped eating at restaurants and relied on cooking for themselves. That has caused a sudden, tremendous, and unforeseen increase in the demand for retail food products.

Bulk grains, however, are not really a retail food product. They are a wholesale food product being sold by retail outlets. Bulk foods come in the same large packages that restaurants buy. If anything, there should be sale prices on bulk rice, because distributors should be trying to dispose of a glut of it, as restaurants are no longer purchasing the 50 lb. bags of rice that my local coop uses to fill the bulk bins with.

But no. Most of the rice bins in the bulk section remain empty as of today. It’s very strange.

Published at 10:34 on 27 February 2020

The CDC is starting to publicly come on board with my predictions about coronavirus.

Note I said “publicly” above. They doubtless have known the awful truth (and know the awful parts left unsaid by them so far) for a week or more. They’re just letting it out in small chunks, instead of all at once, to reduce the shock value and thus minimize the chance of causing panic. A responsible agency really can’t do otherwise, after all.

Published at 12:11 on 24 February 2020

When the Fukushima Daiichi reactors melted down, I could tell something really bad was was happening, despite the general lack of news stories that something really bad was in fact happening. (The news coming out was designed to give the impression that it was serious, but not Chernobyl-serious.)

Why? Because of how the news cycle happened. Normally, in the case of a potentially serious nuclear accident, one would expect the number of stories about it, and the details given in those stories, to rapidly increase. That didn’t happen with the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Instead, the stories only slowly trickled out, and often were not even on the front page.

Furthermore, facts were appearing in those non-front-page stories that were extremely disquieting to anyone with a basic knowledge of nuclear reactor design and operation.

The big one was when they started reporting that sea water was being used to cool the reactors. Nuclear reactors are precision equipment, operated with meticulous care to ensure outside contamination doesn’t promote unexpected corrosion or intoduce dirt that might hamper their operation. Reactor cooling water is highly purified and closely monitored for contaminants. Yet they were now pumping raw sea water into the reactors “to cool them.”

Sea water is extremely corrosive stuff. A significant part of the civil engineering is coping with how corrosive salt water is to structures. And yet they were pumping this corrosive stuff into a nuclear reactor of all places? The only way that would make sense is as a last-ditch desparate measure.

Moreover, modern nuclear reactors are closed systems: the primary cooling water is simply recycled over and over, pumping it through microfilters to keep it as clean as possible. As such, it is unusual and abnormal to have to add water to them, because this normally means that water is somehow leaking out. A leak of primary cooling water means a leak of radioactivity, since the primary cooling water is in contact with the reactor core and therefore itself becomes radioactive.

Put it all together and it meant that the reactors were leaking massive amounts of radioactivity and were on the verge of or starting to melt down, and its operators were frantically taking last-ditch desperate measures. That was the only conceivable narrative that made sense of all known facts.

Then reports started filtering in (not prominently featured reports, of course, but still reports from reliable and trusted news sources) of privately-run radiation monitors showing elevated levels. More than one monitor was showing elevated levels, which points to a distant major leak of radiation, not a nearby minor one. Obviously, at least one reactor had fully melted down, and was now spewing radiation like mad into the environment. Fukushima was, in other words, another Chernobyl.

At that stage, I tried pointing that out to people, and almost universally got the reaction that I was being a baseless alarmist. When all was said and done, the IAEA gave the catastrophe a rating of 7 on a scale of 1 to 7. The only other nuclear catastrophe to rate a 7 so far has been, yes, Chernobyl.

The overall moral of it all is that news agencies do sometimes act in concert, downplaying the seriousness of a story. Most likely, this is done out of a sense of responsibility on such agencies to avoid instilling mass panic.

The reporting about coronavirus reminds me of nothing if not the reporting about Fukushima Daiichi. Again, we have a story about something of extremely serious concern. Again, the reports haven’t been dominating the front pages as much might be expected: if coronavirus becomes a pandemic, it will by all best evidence be Spanish Flu v2.0, given that the best evidence indicates coronavirus is approximately as lethal as the Spanish Flu was. That’s a really big story. Yet it only sometimes comes up on the front pages; stories about the primary election dominate here in the USA.

Let’s review some of the basics about coronavirus, shall we?

1. Known: It emerged in China.
2. Known: The Chinese government admits that over 77,000 have been infected in that country.
3. Known: China is a totalitarian dictatorship.
4. Known: Totalitarian dictatorships tend to cover up or downplay news stories that make their countries look bad.
5. Known: Coronavirus has a long incubation period, which has generally suspected to be up to 14 days.
6. Known: During that incubation period, a person is contagious, and doesn’t even know it.
7. Conclusion: Therefore there are likely far more than 77,000 Chinese infected right now, most of whom are running around infecting others, because they don’t even know they are sick.
8. Known: Quarantines have been based on that 14-day incubation period.
9. Known: Evidence is now emerging that the incubation period might be longer than 14 days.
10. Conclusion: There is therefore a good chance that the quarantines will prove to be ineffective, and that coronavirus is already spreading uncontrolled in most of the world (we just don’t know it yet, due to the long incubation period).
11. Known: Coronavirus has been reported in Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq.
12. Known: Syria lies between Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq.
13. Known: Syria is currently a war zone.
14. Known: It is difficult to know or control what happens in a war zone.
15. Conclusion: Therefore coronavirus is or soon will be in Syria.
16. Known: Coronavirus has also been reported from Afghanistan.
17. Known: Afghanistan is also a war zone.
18. Conclusion: By virtue of being present in a not one but two war zones, coronavirus is now spreading absolutely uncontrolled.

All of the facts tagged as known above have been reported by well-regarded news sources. The only thing I am doing here is assembling them in one place, in a logical order, and arriving at some inescapable conclusions.

As mentioned before, the closest analogue to coronavirus is the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which spread worldwide and killed between 40 and 100 million people, or between 2.2 and 5.5 percent of the global population. If it happened today, that would be a death toll of 170 to 430 million. That is the most likely eventual outcome of coronavirus that can be predicted using the best available current knowledge.

When (not if, when) coronavirus becomes widespread in whatever country you live in, expect the same sort of severely disruptive total lockdowns of entire cities and regions now going on in China. Expect shortages and disruptions of food and common household goods. The time to start stocking up and preparing for this is now.

Published at 16:50 on 3 July 2019

An interesting condo was listed for sale on Monday. I immediately contacted my agent up there and requested we do a walk-through via Skype. That happened today, and it still looked interesting enough that I made plans to see it myself the next business day (i.e. Friday).

And now we learn that it has sold already. So be it. I’m unwilling to buy anything sight unseen, particularly after that experience with the mold-infested unit that looked so nice in pictures. Plus while the location was beautiful (on a dead-end street adjacent to a greenbelt), both the street network leading there and the complex itself were bicycle-hostile.

Exactly how hostile was a matter of question, and part of my due diligence on Friday was to ride around on my bike and get some feel for how bad the trip downtown would actually have been. I’m still planning on doing that, simply in case anything else in that area comes up for sale (there’s lots of condos in that part of town).

Ah, well, the search continues.

Published at 19:22 on 27 February 2019

After his first bus was cancelled before it left Seattle (Greyhound lied and claimed I-5 was closed even though the ODOT TripCheck site clearly indicated it had reopened), and his second bus was cancelled in Portland (Greyhound lied again and claimed it was so they could drive through snow areas in daylight, even though in the present cold pattern the snow zones start in the southern Willamette Valley, where his new bus will be traveling in the predawn darkness), I think it’s safe to say Greyhound isn’t reliable either.

I rather suspect Greyhound is choosing to tell lies about the weather and road conditions so they can summarily cancel lightly-booked buses.

That said, it still beats Amtrak (which won’t be resuming travel in southern Oregon and northern California until Friday) in the reliability department

Published at 12:45 on 26 February 2019

Sorry, railfans. It’s just not. Certainly not in the wintertime between Oakland and Seattle.

I just saw off a visiting friend from the Bay Area. He’s taking the bus back home. To get here, he carpooled. He had planned to take Amtrak both ways, but both trains were cancelled due to heavy low-elevation snow bringing down trees on the tracks.

In Europe or Japan, that would simply not have happened. Those trees would have been recognized as threatening the tracks and dealt with (i.e. either logged or pruned) a long time ago. Just in case that failed, there would have been safety procedures in place that allowed them to be promptly cleared and the flow of rail traffic restored.

That’s not how things work in the USA. First, the trees were left to grow, unlogged and unpruned. Then when they came down, there were no procedures in place for dispatching emergency track crews to promptly clear the right-of-way. Even if there had been, there were no modern regulations in place that would have allowed rail traffic to resume promptly.

And really, why should there be either? Amtrak doesn’t own any track in the Western USA. It’s all owned by freight railroads, who specialize in low-priority bulk cargo. It doesn’t much matter if low-priority bulk cargo gets delayed by weather for a day or three. If it did, it wouldn’t be low-priority bulk cargo and it would be shipped by truck.

Truck shipping actually does cost a fair bit more than rail shipping. As, logically, it should: labor cost is much higher. A crew of two can man a freight train of a hundred cars of more. Each of these cars can carry more freight than a single truck (and each truck needs at least one driver). Rail’s labor costs are thus much lower, and that’s before bringing fuel costs (also lower for rail) into the picture.

So why do people ship by truck? Simple: speed and reliability. It’s worth paying a premium for shipments that arrive quicker and with more predictability. Rail is where the less-urgent shipments go, and those tend to be large quantities of low-value-per-unit-weight bulk commodities. The two freight modes have specialized themselves to cater to two separate market segments.

And it is freight modes, because the railroads themselves don’t transport passengers. They have delegated that money-losing business proposition to the nationalized Amtrak.

In Europe, the railroads themselves tend to be nationalized, and to have a public mandate to carry passengers. They control the tracks, and maintain them to significantly higher standards than the US freight railroads do. Passenger rail in Europe is therefore a viable, reliable transport option. Plus, Europe is smaller and more densely-populated than North America, making distances shorter (another factor that works in factor of rail there).

By contrast, in the USA, rail passengers are stuck with a skeletal network typically offering only once-daily service, on lines run by railroads that view renting rail space to Amtrak as at best a necessary evil and more typically as an archaism to be discouraged by being as uncooperative as possible.

Even the much-maligned Greyhound is more reliable than Amtrak. Why? It relies on the highway network, and the latter is publicly owned and does have a public mandate to open promptly and provide reliable service to both private motorists and to motor-freight companies.

The recent snowstorms have been exceptional, and did close I-5, too. The difference is that I-5 reopened within ten hours. The delays for buses, trucks, and private automobiles were much more manageable than the delays for trains.

So, while rail easily can be a reliable mode, in the USA, alas, it is all-too-often not.

Published at 08:27 on 30 December 2018

For many years, the basic principles of thermodynamics stumped physicists. John Dalton hadn’t propounded his atomic theory yet, so the mountains of evidence in favor of atoms and molecules had not been convincingly compiled, thus the alternate (and correct) explanation of heat being the kinetic energy of atoms and molecules rattling (or in the case of gases, ricocheting) around didn’t exist. Therefore physicists hypothesized the existence of a mysterious substance called caloric, which was said to embody heat; heating and cooling was interpreted as a flow of caloric.

For many years, the propagation of light and radio waves stumped physicists. Such radiation clearly took the form of waves, yet what was waving? Sound waves and water waves involve matter making waves. Yet light travels just fine through interplanetary space. Therefore, they thought, the universe must be pervaded with a luminiferous ether, the oscillations of which caused light to propagate. Eventually Einstein’s theories of relativity obsoleted the need to hypothesize an ether into existence.

Numerous experiments were performed in attempt to detect both presumed substances, all to no avail. Eventually, alternate and better explanations for both phenomena were arrived at, ones that did not involve the conjuring into existence of hypothetical types of matter. However, the critical point is that for some reason, people seem to prefer imagining matter into existence over revising their theories of the rules for the behavior of observable matter.

This predilection explains religious mythology as well as scientific dead-ends. Dating back to prehistory, invisible realms were conjured from the imagination to explain the holes in our understanding of the natural world. Can’t understand storms, the change of seasons, or the apparent motion of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars? Invent gods and a realm in which they dwell to explain it all.

It is reasonable to assume that this aspect of human nature is still with us today. Which brings me to dark matter: it has a lot in common with the earlier caloric or luminiferous ether. There is absolutely no evidence in its favor save how our current understanding of the laws of physics fails to explain the behavior of galaxies and other very large-scale phenomena. Nobody has ever actually detected so much as the smallest iota of this “dark matter.”

The most logical explanation is that dark matter simply doesn’t exist. It is a scientific dead-end that our human nature has conned many of us into chasing. There are in fact some astrophysicists who have come to this very conclusion.

The rub is, so far, none of the known alternate explanations (that do not involve dark matter) have yet proven sufficiently convincing. This may be because the correct explanation has yet to be arrived at, or it may be because prejudice is preventing an existing (albeit not well-known) correct explanation from being well-accepted. I will freely admit I do not know enough about the subject to offer any informed opinion as to which of the two is more likely.

But, based on what the history of not just science but all of human culture tells me about human nature, I strongly suspect that dark matter will eventually be consigned to the same dustbin of scientific history that caloric and the luminiferous ether currently are in.

Published at 08:30 on 26 December 2018

For those who don’t know, lane splitting is when motorcycles ride in the gaps between lanes of stopped or very slow cars in heavy traffic. It sounds intrinsically dangerous, yet is legal in California, and there is no abnormally high rate of crashes involving motorcycles there.

It should be legal everywhere not only because it enables motorcyclists to commute faster (thus rewarding people for using vehicles that burn less fuel), but because it enables better traffic flow for all vehicles.

Motorcycles, you see, can cause inefficient flow in heavy traffic. This is because motorcycles rely on the angular momentum of their wheels for stability, which in turn means motorcycles have a minimum speed, below which they become unrideable. When this happens, the motorcyclist is compelled to stop, which compels all following vehicles to stop. Slow traffic has now been turned into erratically-flowing, stop-and-go traffic.

Letting motorcyclists split lanes prevents them from being compelled to stop and mess up the traffic flow in these lanes. Thus it is a win for all road users.