Climbing Up

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Times are only good in retrospect. Those were the good old times, never These are the good times or those will be the good times.

Also Man was made to strive. We thrive on it.

Friends, we’ve hit the mother load, as we live in times where striving is on the menu every day and multiple times a day.

As good as it felt to get the dead jackboot of the previous regime off our the neck of the economy, it ain’t going to get much better for a looooong time.

Part of it is … that the eighteenth century gave governments the idea they could and should control the economy and the 20th gave them the illusion they could do so. It’s an illusion because while they can hurt the economy, they really can’t improve it unless they take hands off it completely. And of course government by its very nature is averse to that. So instead they do what government does best: hurt its own people and take their stuff.

At the same time, and partly probably because of the economy trying to avoid the abusive hand of government, we’re living in very fast, very strange, very changeable technological times. (Okay, this sounds like personification. That’s not what I mean. Of course that’s not what I mean. But the economy is made of people and — see the Man was made to STRIVE thing — humans rarely just lie down and die. You push us one way, we might go a hundred others, but unless in extreme circumstances and extremely and historically abusive cultures, we don’t just lie down and take it. What that means is that things flow into truly weird channels, as humans try to avoid repression.)

To explain, and I’ve rang that alarm bell here: if your government is controlling things so no native-born can get a job — and they were — then the story brain goes “that’s it. We’re done forever.” But that’s not the way real life works. In real life, kids tinker. Geeks get in garages and make things. And tech enables tech which changes every day life, which enables newer tech, which…. in an ever accelerating rhythm.

The problem is we don’t even know the side effects of some of the tech before other derivative tech is changing things over again.

I come from a time when a typewriter was a writer’s tool, then I wrote on computers, now I can typeset and put the book up in a couple of clicks. It’s been 25 years since I was first published. I won’t say this is unnatural, but it’s very fast tech progression. In some places and some fields, catastrophically fast.

So–

Well, this is good. That change is so fast. And yes, I’m aware I used “catastrophic” as an adjective, because it’s like a hurricane, changing the landscape as it goes. OTOH… if you’re having trouble keeping track of the change, it’s harder for the government to stick its nose in. Not impossible, heaven knows, but harder. Which means more freedom.

I had a big fight with someone very weird on X who was ready to sit down and sing her death song because “everything is going down the tubes since the seventies.”

I assume she’s younger than I. I lived through the seventies (granted very young at the start) and once that dismal decade was done things got BETTER. In fact until Obama, the best part about getting old was getting further and further away from the seventies. And even Obama couldn’t bring the 70s back. Thank heavens. Though Biden got close.

Meanwhile I and one of my younger commenters were telling her “no. There’s still hope for the future. There’s lots of tech that allows young people to thrive and make money.” And she was ignoring that this is possible.

Yes, it’s difficult. Very difficult. In some ways more difficult than we had it. In other ways… in other ways, what a wonderful time to be young.

They do not have the pathways, obviously open and ready to receive them, that they can just walk into if they do the thing and have the right preparation.

On the other hand, the future is wide open in a way ours never was. They know the possibilities for one. In the sense that the internet and the free flow of information tells them what is out there, what works, what doesn’t. And the wealth of knowledge is unbelievable.

Look, I went into writing dumb and blind, as most people do, with no idea of how the business worked — or that it was collapsing hard even as I was trying to get in — with only books and movies as lights for the way.

This was terrible because in movies and books, if your book is good and you work hard, you have amazing success. None of it was ever true. And by not knowing the truth and what actually influenced getting support and promo from your publisher, I did everything wrong and sideways.

Perhaps I’d still have done it that way. I’m not the brightest about social interaction, and there’s only so far you can push yourself. But at least I’d know. I wouldn’t eat my heart out for years wondering why my books weren’t “good enough.”

But also indie is so much more open, easier, more profitable. Even if I need to do a ton of research on publicity (so many scams. SO MANY) and set up my own shop and go wide. But the information is out there and I can do it. And if I were twenty, I’d have so much more energy and so many fewer demands.

The future isn’t dark. It might require a little more striving than has been normal the last hundred years, but the last hundred years have been a confusion of wars and killings to rival the 14th century.

This is more like the opening of new colonies. There is danger. Of course there is danger. There is every possibility of failure.

But the possibilities of success haven’t been so bright, so accessible, and the information so open.

No, your children won’t find the path you followed. Heck, if you’re of my generation, there was never a path. Just a crumbling edge you clung to, and sometimes jumped off of just in time.

If you have children — people ask me this — and want to prepare them to succeed, don’t put your trust in degrees or even in blue collar certifications. All of that is changing too fast. One or the other can be useful for a time, but it’s unlikely to be a life career.

Instead, teach them to start and run their own business as early as you can. Teach them to see the possibilities for businesses, to analyze profit and loss and know when to cut and find something else. Teach them flexibility!

It takes a lot more reflection these days, because things are changing so deeply. If you have children, it’s good if you do your own analysis and can guide and teach.

However, the most important thing is to know the opportunities are there, and they’re wide open if you can find them: More than in the 70s. More than at any time in the last 20th centuries.

Yes, the risk is immense too, but it’s always been for high reward.

Just remember: The cowards never start, the weak die along the way, but those who stick to it will find untold possibility.

That’s the way of the future and it’s always been.

The current future is just full of endless possibilities.

73 thoughts on “Climbing Up”

  1. Makes me wonder what my life would be like if I were trying to establish a writing career as a young man now instead of in the 70’s. No waiting for months to see if some editor wanted my story. No waiting for years for them to pay me if they bought it. Maybe, as you say, “These ARE the good old days!”

    Liked by 2 people

    2. If you were in your 20’s, what could you write about? I couldn’t have written what I’m writing these days back when I was 20. I didn’t have the ideas or the background knowledge, much less the vocabulary and facility with language. My writing would have been stuck in the 90% of everything which is crap.
      ———————————
      The early bird might get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. You might have surprised yourself. I admit that when I started I was writing crap. At 18 I realized I knew nothing, but by the time I was in my late 20’s I was writing pretty good stuff. I just couldn’t sell it to the propaganda factories. I’m not sure my forty years as a software engineer made me a better writer, but seemingly it didn’t make me a worse one.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I know my 35 -ish years as a software programmer made me a better writer. Heck keyboards attached to screens make me a better writer (lousy typewriter typist, and I do touch type). I just do not have the drive to write anything now.

          What drove me to write when I was working was “I am NOT explaining this … Again!” Sometimes even to the same person. Write it up. Get the call. Send it. If they call Again. Have them bring it up on the shared screen, then explain it paragraph by picture. I was even patient and polite. Few did that twice. Only calling if I somehow missed something in the explanations. Software did have “documentation”. Just the documentation had a lot of “What”, but lacking “Why”, “What’s Next”, “Where did this come from?”, “Hierarchy”, and occasionally “This is how this changed, and Why it changed” (one line “been on the yearly upgrade list for last 5+ years”).

          I could probably write up a paper for new upcoming software developers on “Do not get too attached to your brilliant software you just finished”. 😁 You know why too. Paper would be short. But the truth.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I remember some congresscritter asking an engineer “Why do you keep changing the software? It’s been ten years, why can’t you get it right?”

            The engineer: “Why do you keep passing laws? It’s been 200 years; why can’t you get it right?”
            ———————————
            There are forms of stupidity that businesses can’t indulge in. There are no such limitations on the stupidity of government.

            Liked by 5 people

            1. One of the biggest things that attracted me about a software career, was that, unlike art or other endeavors, I didn’t have to just throw something away if I didn’t get it right. I just had to fix the error(s) and voila, now it worked. Of course eventually I did get better at getting it right the first time, because I learned a lot from my errors.

              As to forms of stupidity, business can indulge in a lot of stupidity–until it eventually catches up with them–see Disney. The big thing is feedback. Once you cut off or stop listening to feedback, your enterprise is doomed. Government is a special case because it’s designed such that those who deliver the services never have to deal with the consequences of delivering a useless, or less than useless, product.

              Liked by 1 person

          2. I could probably write up a paper for new upcoming software developers on “Do not get too attached to your brilliant software you just finished”. 

            You could….. but every time I think about doing that, I realize a guy named Brooks already said it better in t961:

            The last woe, and sometimes the last straw, is that the product over which one has labored so long appears to be obsolete upon (or before) completion. Already colleagues and competitors are in hot pursuit of new and better ideas. Already the displacement of one’s thought-child is not only conceived, but scheduled.

            Brooks, “Mythical Man-Month”

            Liked by 3 people

            2. I finally read Brooks this year.

              Very helpful.

              The other software book I read this year was I think Peopleware, by demarco and I want to say Lister. They helped me to understand more of my issues getting programming done well.

              After I did my first read, I passed them on to my mom for a while.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Anything that helps you learn to think and communicate clearly and logically will help. I believe that the best programmers and software designers/engineers/diagnosticians have good a balance between strong math and strong verbal skills

                The two things that helped me the most were chasing bugs in a very early C compiler, and a course by Jacob Schwartz at NYU. The first showed me just how clear and effective well-written (well thought-out!) code can be. It was actually a shock. The second was a course on proving programs. It used an annotated version of Schwartz’s SETL language. The machine-checked annotations were assumptions and assertions, not quite preconditions and postconditions, and thinking about collections of data as sets gave me a powerful, general mental tool for thinking about how a program went about its job.

                Like

            3. Yes Brooks did say it better and sooner.

              At least my own work had a few years before it was obsolete. Of coarse the reason why I had a job at all was there was mostly niche work that there wasn’t anything else out there anywhere. OTOH I know all my work from back then had to be replaced regardless. None of it would run on current PC’s, Windows/DOS, Apple iOS, or Unix.

              I had to laugh a few years ago. Was on a pack walk with a local dog trainer. One of the other walkers, a independent forester who cruised for local timber companies. He talked/gushed about the two companies that bought the assets (timberlands) and major software called the “Forest Mgmt Information System”/”FMIS” now called “FMGIS”. Why the laugh? TheFMIS” was my main maintenance system. It was 30 -ish years old in ’90. By the sale, six years later, the team, me, the foresters, the statistics forester, and road engineer, had the GIS installed, the new design for integration of the FMIS designed, the system and the data integration coding started (infant stages, but it was started). By the time this person was talking about the software, it was 20 years later. Bones were still there, but not only had the coding tools improved, so had GIS software capabilities. Amazing what a 10 person programming software team can accomplish verses the two of us in ’96. Yes a bit of sarcasm there.

              The other item I learned about this person is he lived and went to the same HS as hubby and hubby’s siblings, bit before hubby, but after all of hubby’s three siblings. Small world.

              Like

          3. Well, I did write up my own “work biography” https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3N2N14N about my my career, but I put most of the technical stuff in what I called “Geeky Asides” because I found I had a lot to say a bout how business works. My younger colleagues kept bugging me about how I should write down my “old man” stories, so I did.

            Like

                1. It did to me.

                  OTOH while not on the grand scale, or very early years (first computer class was on a teletype and mainframe, second was 8 years later on CPM and Apple IIe). The smaller scale of my career mirrored yours.

                  Liked by 1 person

    3. Was a time when working for yourself was considered as much a part of being adult as marrying and living in your own home. Youngsters lived in other people’s homes, were single, and worked for wages.

      Like

  2. Climbing up?

    But I suspect one might have to “move sideways” to avoiding obstacles. 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊

    Liked by 1 person

  4. (Yes, I did miss you. Glad to know that the others are well, or as well as can be. Condolences also to everyone about Havey. )

    Anyway, on topic for this post would be ‘No, we are totally doomy doom doomed.’

    Human brains are optimized for finding patterns, and can actually ‘find’ ‘patterns’ in stuff that one can actually know are truly random noise. This is one of the reasons why we have put so much into automatic pattern detection over the last decades, automation is cheaper /and/ you can maybe tune the method to detect only the desired sorts of patterns.

    Anyway, human skill is experience, and is more productively applied nearer to the experience. Largely because a to-do list that is statistically near past experience is likely to break down into sub tasks with cross over.

    Rumors happens to a greater degree when previously distrusted sources discredit themselves more. Part of metnal map, then gone, because of mental map against mental map cross checks.

    It is also navigation problem with no sensor noise, when a previously uninspected but default trust source proves to be false when checked more thoroughly for a next use.

    Genuine changes in economic state spaces are also disorienting.

    Anyway, enough disorientation amounts to being similar to a very noisy situation with interested targets to detect and track.

    ‘no goods detected’ and ‘danger’ are patterns we can read into fairly chaotic noise.

    There are some decision patterns of note.

    One is that some of the ‘doom’ inferences are in fact based on ‘information’ that we can actually verify that we don’t have. By default, on a lot of things, we are trained on sloppy theoretical models. (Stricter models are harder to develop, to teach, or to learn.) Almost always we have a model somewhere, that should not be trusted and emotionally weighted to the degree that we have chosen to.

    Two, Trust that God is in control, and that things will work out for the Good. (This is about God being able to calculate state spaces on the fly in response to human will, and to distribute best practices and optimal courses via the Bible and the Holy Ghost. It does not mean that individual acts of sin and evil are impossible, or are not important. Utilitarian function imitation is obviously a false approach to teaching Christianity, but this can be explained as being a grounding method that avoids spending energy in useless ways.)

    Third is that needed skills will remain statistically related to past samples of needed skills. Because humans will still exist, and will remain humans.

    Economic changes will happen, and will not change that humans eat, that humans like to talk, and et cetera. This is maybe somehow related to an inverse operation of what austrian economics says about the impossibility of ideal central control. Theoretical models have limited ability to truly dictate change, and so a change in one machine pattern does not change the whole of human nature.

    I definitely have found things scary and concerning. Does not mean that I do have something that I absolutely should and must about the scary factors. Even if I am more correct, and others are more wrong.

    Anyway, I apparently search very hard for tasks which I can do, which are very distinct from and a distraction from what I should be doing.

    Like

  5. I have always been glad that I had the military retirement pension – it paid the mortgage (which is now entirely paid off! Huzzah!) because that was one of the elements that underwrote me trying to make it as an indy writer of historical and YA fiction. And to have the partnership and later total ownership in the Teeny Publishing Bidness … there were always things that came my way at the most opportune moments. I could never foresee them … but as my daughter often observed – something always came up.

    Like the lost dog that we returned to owners — on Christmas Eve, no less. And they came back and gave us a Christmas card … with a reward in it, which totally made an otherwise hard-luck Christmas into something wonderful.

    Something always comes up.

    (So sorry to hear about Havey-cat. Glad that you have the Misoites, though.)

    Liked by 3 people

  6. The major skill that this part of the 21st century seems to want—no matter what field you’re in—is self-promotion. Whatever you want to do, the first step is drawing attention to yourself and convincing the world that you are the absolute greatest at doing it. Once you have that attention, it helps if you’re at least competent, but if you can’t promote yourself, it really doesn’t matter how good you are at writing, or science, or even mowing lawns.

    And for those of us who, upon being told, “Promote yourself or shove this hot poker in your eye,” would put on oven mitts and reach for the poker, it’s going to be a tough future.

    In movies and books, if your book is good and you work hard, you have amazing success.

    I remember reading books about writers and constantly hearing, “Oh, if the book is good enough, it will sell. Luck makes it sell faster, but of course someone will publish it if it’s good enough.” I had to remind myself that the person writing that line was someone whose book did sell and thus not necessarily representative of all writers out there trying.

    Although some of the idiocy was too much even for that. I remember the pilot episode of Muder, She Wrote, where Jessica didn’t even have to do the bare minimum: her nephew read her book and submitted it to a publisher, who naturally agreed it was the most brilliant thing ever and wanted to publish it. He didn’t even tell Jessica until the contract was ready for her to sign. I’m sure the rest of the episode was fascinating, but I missed it due to the fact I’d rolled my eyes out of my head and spent the remainder of the hour trying to find them under the couch.

    Liked by 3 people

      2. Same.

        It applies no matter what you are doing. Even if you aren’t self employed. You must promote yourself, or minimum do not let others take credit for the work you did. Just doing extremely well at your tasks is not enough.

        I was extremely lucky that clients, most of whom I never met, just over telephone, or email, went out of their way to let my boss know they appreciated my type of help. Never once got told “I provide too much explanation that wasn’t asked for”. Not at work. Elsewhere, yes. “Keep doing what you are doing”, was the result of the few yearly reviews.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I love my small-company job. I don’t have to worry about others taking credit for my work because I do what I get assigned to do and the proof is that it’s done. And it is indeed small enough that the bosses know everyone personally; we just had a company outing that was 30-40 people, pretty much representing 95%+ of the staff.

          Like

            1. Beats mine. Worked for a firm when I went on maternity leave that was 3 people. 1 1/2 employees, and the boss. I was the part-time, 1/2 employee.

              Like

          2. Never had to experience that myself either. Heard of it though.

            Like to think it is one of those things everyone hears about but never happens. Doubt it.

            Liked by 1 person

  7. But I don’t want to start my own business. It’s a pain in the ass! You have to deal with the government. Banks. Insurance. More government. Lawyers. Accountants. Still More Government. All that government meddling makes it almost impossible to run a small business. AAAGGHKH!!

    I liked being an employee. I did my job, I got paid, and Somebody Else got to deal with all that other crap.

    Well, I don’t have to worry about it any more. I’ve got enough saved up to retire without Socialist Security.
    ———————————
    A company that doesn’t make profits is not a business, it’s an expensive hobby.

    Like

    1. “But I don’t want to start my own business. It’s a pain in the ass! You have to deal with the government.”

      Me too, but I’m a storyteller, so now I have no choice. It’s a do it yourself job. Gotta write. Gotta learn enough art to create covers. Gotta learn how to write a blurb. Gotta go out and market/advertise your stuff. Yes, and cuz it doesn’t pay well, gotta do your own taxes. Then there’s sale tax if you go to Cons to sell your books. Recently, I even realized you have to learn how to do autographs. :) Such tsuris!

      Liked by 1 person

  8. I get frustrated with the “the internet will do it all” prophets (and others). Computers and tech will do things we can’t predict. This might be very good, or … well … Yes. The Industrial Revolution did make industrial cities worse (air quality, sanitation, crime) for a while, even as the standard of living rose overall. I’m not wildly excited about the AI bubble, and the still-limping-along wind and solar bubble. When they burst, the people who have pinned their hopes on those are going to hurt, and that includes a goodly number of people in my part of the US. But who knows what comes after? Not I. I have hopes, but I’m not into prophecy. [Thanks be!]

    Liked by 1 person

    2. The “AI” bubble, the wind-and-solar bubble, the even bubblier(?) “robot / autonomous cornucopian abundance” bubble so many people (as measured, rather perilously, by places like X)… so many and so grand the hopes and promises, their various end-of-bubble crashes are likely to be epic.

      But of course the big trick is to tell the hype and dreamcloud-building from the still very real new powers and opportunities in all of that. Imagine someone who picked up crash-cheap stuff, and then actually did something useful and profitable with it…

      Some of my vignette characters just showed up talking about Borrowed Intelligence in place of Artificial Intelligence — which is a pretty good way to think of “AI” run-able statistical abstractions. Maybe (as with politics today) the de-hype-ification process can often start with calling things by their right names; or, at least, by some righter name than the now-conventional hypester-isms.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. “The Internet” does nothing. People using, managing, or (spit) monetizing it do things. That’s what we need to be mindful of.

      Technology only does what people make it do. It’s done what it’s done because people with no or alien moral compasses made it do that. Change that and the results change.

      Like

      1. Technology only does what people make it do. It’s done what it’s done because people with no or alien moral compasses made it do that. 

        This is possibly the biggest issue with AI: it adds a thick layer of obfuscation in identifying the culprits.

        Liked by 2 people

        2. There is a subtle but real distinction between “do” and “enable”. In this context, the difference is rather pedantic, though.

          Highways do far less than the Internet. Highways mostly just lay upon the ground. The Internet actively does stuff (name lookups, packet routing, etc…). If I had to live without one or the other, I’d ditch the Internet in a heartbeat. Roads are far more important for enabling me to be fed. Although the Internet is enabling a lot of farming improvements, it doesn’t get the food off the farm.

          Electricity is a bit harder to put in one of those two bins because it both does (e.g. turns motors) and enables (e.g. powering the Internet).

          Liked by 1 person

  9. FLEXIBILITY, in bold print, all caps, highlighted, this is the key to success, however you define it. You obliquely touch on it, you need to overtly hammer it. FLEXIBILITY.

    Your blog is always worth the time to me.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Interstate 11 between CA of all places and points east is loaded with trucks carrying goods at most times of day or night. I should know, they get in my way as I’m going to and from work. Maybe not loaded but there’s a whole lot of them for a defunct economy. Remember CA, vile as it is, is where the ports are.

    Like

    1. There’s two things involved in that

      • The west coast ports are larger than most of the east coast ports.
      • The sources of the material being transferred are on the PACIFIC not the Atlantic.

      Some things still come out of the EU (tooling though Korea Japan and even China are giving that a run, chip making hardware, luxuries) but not basic commercial goods in the sheer quantities that come out of Asia. To ship stuff from Asia to the US East coast there are essentially 4 pathways

      • Around the Cape of Good Hope
      • Around Cape Horn (including through the Straight of Magellan)
      • Through the Panama Canal
      • Through the Suez Canal

      The Cape passages add many days to the trip and honestly pass through some VERY rough seas, not a favorite for container ships I’d imagine, not sure how much we get on bulk carriers anymore. The Panama and the Suez are near or at max carrying capacity (Suez carrying stuff from Asia to Europe). This is an 80’s and later change used to be the Eastern ports were some of the busiest in the world, but they’ve stagnated in 1990 technology due to aggressive unions and flagging need.

      Like

    2. Just wait til 2030 when CA makes it illegal to own or drive diesel trucks. As John Lennon might have sung.
      Imagine all those ‘lectric trucks
      heading for Nevada.
      Invest in the CA/NV borderlands. You can create all the transfer stations for the cargo to go from useless electric to reliable diesel to transport stuff to the rest of the country.

      Like

  11. The current future is just limited opportunities to buy ammo.

    Unless Marquess of Queensberry Rules are dropped, additional miracles happen, and Rubicons get crossed.

    Like

  12. Hi Sarah. Great post! I echo the sentiment from a slightly older perspective than you. The only constant about the world is change. I became an engineer when hand calculators were new and no one knew what a personal computer was. In every change, new opportunities always abound. One must be willing to see. I do still kinda hate cell phones, though, tbh. Cheers!

    Like

    1. oh. You know I write by ear-dictation, which sounds weird. So this happens. I actually looked at the post going “this doesn’t sound right” but I was too tired to figure it out.
      Now, do I change or not?:

      Like

  14. I hear “These are the good old days” on Muzak in places and cringe.

    There are NO “good old days” – save living relatives, friends, and pets in those times.

    Like

    1. “…everything is going down the tubes since the seventies…”

      Four(-ish) words: computers in the 1970s.

      Maybe I didn’t get my hands on anything worthy of the name till the calendar 80s; but, wow.

      Mainframes and terminals; and I started (very briefly) on punch cards. (I could still likely work a keypunch, incl. those tricks for copying a line with characters either added or deleted. Hint, hold your thumb on one card to stop it moving as you hit ‘space’ or ‘copy’ — and yes, it’s one whole card per 80-character line, always and perforce, for anyone who doesn’t know.) Terminals were 1200 baud, 300 if you were unlucky, 9600 if you were insanely fortunate and/or in-the-know.

      My first computer, a Mac 512K, was about as fast as those 360 / 370 mainframes, and had only a dozen or so times less memory. Now I can buy something with about a third that much memory, and far faster, that’s about the size of a mailing label and costs roughly $10-20. My first hard disk unit was an Apple HD20 — 20 megabytes not gigabytes or terabytes. (And none of that, of course, was 1970s-era at all.)

      In other news, the early decade featured The Arab Oil Embargo; and the mid-decade the crash of a North Vietnamese tank through the gates of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Yea, jolly times.

      As our Esteemed Blogmistress said right at the top, times are seldom so “good” when you’re living through them (hopefully as best you can). It’s only later you can pick and choose. If you want.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. I dunno, 1989 was a pretty good year. Still coasting on Reagan’s success, and then the Berlin Wall was torn down. All those damn smug communists going all deer-in-headlights and WTF,O?
      ———————————
      Under capitalism, man exploits man.
      Under communism, it’s the other way round.

      Liked by 1 person

  15. …unless in extreme circumstances and extremely and historically abusive cultures, we don’t just lie down and take it. What that means is that things flow into truly weird channels, as humans try to avoid repression.

    Russia.

    Yes, other countries too, like especially the anomalies of ‘cars in Castro’s Cuba’ and ‘cardboard cars made in East Germany’ and all… but Russia, more and for longer than any country I can think of. (And this is not prompted by reading Kratman et al’s latest gem of WW-I-era Russian alt-hist.)

    Except, possibly, China, about which I know far less. And for which the ‘truly weird’ might be far stranger and vintage than I could properly ever understand.

    There’s a reason some of my Earth-invades-Mars characters say, “Russians never really got back to being native true Russians again… till they first hit our dusty red soil.”

    Liked by 1 person

  16. Oh, I don’t know about that. The house is warm and dry, I’m not hungry, my clothes may be old but still in decent condition. I’m not particularly worried about someone invading my home. My bills are paid. I’m steadily knocking back a couple of tasks for work. Got the part for my tractor to put it back in operation for moving firewood and snow. I slept well last night and woke up this morning alive. These times are still pretty damn good.

    Sure, the idiot voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York voted for more taxes, waste, abuse, and destruction. (Although the opportunity for fraudulent voting can’t be ruled out.) But those are other states, not mine. All I can do is hope that the people in those places don’t suffer too much from the stupidity of their neighbors.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Devil’s advocate: That sounds like the Yuppies that used to shit on us back in the ’80s and ’90s.

      “I got mine, F U, F the world”.

      Not making it personal, but the future is freakin’ scary for the younger generation. Had some interesting talks yesterday with some of the folks I’m coaching and mentoring, they aren’t that positive that what happen yesterday isn’t coming in 2026 for all of the states. There is no other country they can escape to.

      Ignore my rant, enjoy your peace. F the younger generation. Hopefully the real poop doesn’t happen till after we pass…

      Like

        1. I’m not giving up. I’ve had most of my decades.

          Many of my younger relatives and community have given up or are in deep apathy.

          Check the stats on how many 30 year olds can even afford a house vs 20 or 40 years ago. Check the birth rate. Look at the outsourcing and replacement.

          Piping PollyAnna cheers “Keep your chin up!” and “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” doesn’t work for them.

          “Don’t worry! It’s like 1936 Spain or 1965 Rhodesia or 1916 Russia. It will be interesting, if you survive!”

          Their future is so bright, they don’t need shades, they really need night vision goggles.

          And the few that aren’t apathetic but understand reality, are spending a lot more time at the range with my spouse. With and without night vision. And learning skills from remaining Boomers and Gen Xers that see the writing on the wall.

          We are burning our retirement resources so hopefully a few will survive. That’s our hope, individuals, not systems.

          Like

          1. First one to quit loses. And any others. Thus, Never Quit. Not Pollyanna. Pure reality.

            The Enemy sells that “no way to win” crap to get folks to hold still while it gets its way.

            Nope.

            Like

            1. First one to quit loses.

              That’s really obvious but I’ve never thought of it (life, in general, I suppose) that way.

              That’s one of the things I love about this blog: This is not the first time I’ve said that.

              Like

  17. I’m a fimumblety-year-old dude who’s had recent cancer and a bad career track. My future is kinda questionable. The kids, though…they still have a chance. Some are screwed, but some I’ve seen…let’s just say I really like their odds.

    They’ll manage. It’s going to suck for a while, but the seeds for better are planted.

    Like

  18. Well, NYC is going to be a “Gods of the Copybook Headings” sort of example. Good training on how to frustrate the Commies. Bad example as the Commies run out all the productive folks and crap-magnet all the freeloaders.

    Florida should do well, although real-estate is about to get stupid expensive again.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. So they did it. They ‘elected’ Commie Mamdami. While here in Kalifornia they ‘passed’ prop 50, handing control of election districts over to Gruesom. Of course, there is no way to tell how many real, breathing U.S. citizens voted for either one…

      Kalifornia seems to have terminal Trump Derangement. Advertise something as ‘Fighting Trump!!’ and the lemmings rush that way. Whether or not whatever-it-is actually has anything to do with Trump at all.

      At least half of the elections in this country can’t be trusted, and none of the ones in Kalifornia. Universal fraud-by-mail ballots, and if you insist on voting in person, you have to use their machines. You poke at a screen with your fingers, and then a printer spits out a sheet of paper with a cryptic digital symbol. As a voter, you have no way of knowing if that symbol means what it’s supposed to mean. In fact, nobody does.

      The programming in those vote stealing machines is proprietary. Only the company that owns them (they are leased to the government) knows what’s in there. The software has never been verified or validated, and can’t be inspected after the election either. Those machines could do anything with your vote and there is no way for you to know.
      ———————————
      Elections are far too important to be left up to a bunch of unsupervised voters. The Party MUST exercise oversight and management to prevent mere voters from electing the wrong candidates!

      Like

      1. The Babylon Bee had a great headline about how elderly Jews were given a choice between a candidate who wanted to kill them because they were Jewish or a candidate who wanted to kill them because they were elderly…

        Liked by 1 person

        1. So, the thing about a Mayor going full Stalin, full Hitler, or full Hussein, he’s a freaking mayor.

          Will admit that amybe NYC is one of the more powerful ones (in the us), with a lot of people under employment. For good and for ill.

          Local, state, and federal offices all have various powers, which can be abused to awful ends. All fundamentally have limits, based on the people actually present.

          Not necessarily knowable limits, but limits all the same.

          The worse one’s mental model of the population is, and more tyrannical one’s view of the office’s abilities are, the more likely missteps are.

          There’s an amusing thought of some idjit getting himself perp walked, and thinking ‘who knew that there are Jews in the FBI?’

          New York’s problems are broader and crazier than a single mayor. There’s some evidence that they were already intending to try to kill upstate off.

          The intensity of criminals, aliens, and criminal aliens in New York City may mean that he lacks the feedback that stops him early, and it may mean that he is able to do quite horrible things, but we will see. The dude is mouthing off because he is being sheltered and protected by New York Democrats, senior ones, but that does not mean that folks are able to protect him from everything.

          Liked by 1 person

    3. Sounds like in two or three years we should go full “Escape from New York” on them and isolate a huge chunk of the crazies.

      Like

  19. I keep reminding myself: It’s hard to imagine a better, prior time to be alive.

    Hot running water and toilets alone are worth a lot of grief. Add in grocery stores and it’s nearly paradise.

    My grandparents had an outhouse (originally used; kept functional for power outages) and a YUGE garden (two acres, maybe; I was young), which did not come even close to feeding them. I grow a few vegetables mostly because they taste better. (What’s up with grocery store carrots?!?) I can’t imagine actually feeding myself. I can imagine trying, then starving to death.

    Next year’s garden goal: No store tomato products. Buying tomato sauce just seems lazy. If the canning is too much work, then next, next year’s goal will be different.

    Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.