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Having caught a friend’s cold — the best method to get rid of a cold is to pass it on, apparently — I’ve been reading … say it with me: Jane Austen Fanfic.

It’s illuminating, since a lot of the newer people writing it are young. Like, my kids age.

This is not a post about how uniquely bad these kids are or how they don’t do their work. I mean, it’s true some of them are a little … loosey goosey but frankly so were we at their ages, and but for there not being indie publishing at the time, we’d have our own juvenile mistakes all over the place. Heck, I need to republish a couple of my things, and have been delayed by health reasons, and have some of my own mistakes out there (Mostly mistakes of typesetting, to be fair.)

No, the fact is that I can read past typos and strange punctuation. I mean, I read my own first drafts, okay?

But it’s a fascinating window into the younger people’s image of the world and of history. Which, yes, ties up with “what do they teach them,” but also…

Look, people talk about the singularity, but I wonder if it’s already happened. Because it seems absolutely impossible for most people, to be fair, my age and under to conceptualize how different life was in the past.

I only have a little more insight on it because Portugal is consistently twenty years behind Appalachia and playing a game of catch up. They’re weird, because every time I go over there’s something that’s utterly new and they act like it’s always been that way. I guess an adaptation to living in catch up mode. The latest was “laundromats.” They’ve always known them from the movies and TV, so they act like they always had them, but Pepperidge Farms remembers.

Anyway, I have SOME though not enormous view into the past because until I was ten cars were rare, and my parents one and only house move was accomplished by borrowing an ox cart. And most travel was by tram or train. And while in my time, thanks to antibiotics, childhood death was rarer than in mom’s time — though not unheard of — if mom’s childhood stories are real, she lost half her friends to illness and accident before the age of 18.

But most people don’t. And this is particularly true for younger people. Say 40 and below. They grew up in a world that would be considered a paradise by all of mankind that came before the 20th century. An unattainable paradise. And they don’t realize it. Not just how much more they have, but how different their lives are.

The title, and illustration are from one of my “favorite” pet peeves. If for some reason you need to kill someone early they ALWAYS die in a carriage accident.

I about reached my limit with the one where the character’s father (probably in his fifties) died suddenly in a carriage accident. First, this man doesn’t like to travel. And second– argh.

Okay, it’s not that there weren’t carriage accidents. Of course there were. Nor that people couldn’t die in them. They could.

It’s just that… well, guys, fifteen miles an hour was a crazy speed. A carriage accident was in fact far more likely to kill the horses than the people inside. Carriages didn’t, as a rule, careen into each other or t-bone each other, unless there was something seriously funky going on. Mostly accidents were due to breakage or pushing the horses too far, or trying to go through too narrow a passage. They were rarely fatal to the passengers, unless the carriage fell down a ravine or something (and how many ravines were there?) which was more likely to happen in long course travel.

But if you take the fanfic, the level of deaths in carriage accidents was higher than any car accidents nowadays. And it’s ridiculous. Because the reason they’re all over is because these writers reach into “What could cause so and so to be an orphan in his twenties?” and immediately come up with “his parents died in a carriage accident.”

Okay, to begin with and to get it out of the way, in the early 19th century, carriage accidents were rare ways to die mostly because extensive drives by carriage were rare. Let me interject here that they were slightly higher for sporting age and type gentlemen who might be driving high perch phaetons or other vehicles that had no shell and had a high risk of turnover. Heck, the risks of horse back riding deaths were higher. All you had to do was fall wrong. And I understand as with motorcycles, if you ride you will have a spill, the question is where and how.

But you don’t need accidents to justify early — meaning before 60, let alone our normal now of around 80 (Yes, I know what statistics say. Also pfui.) — death. Death was startlingly easy to come by.

It has become normal these days to claim that people always lived “about what they do now” and claim the difference is because childhood death skews statistics. Bullshit. Again, I say to you, bullshit.

In fact this claim is ALMOST a perfect test for strong Marxist convictions. I guess having realized they want to take people back to the middle ages, they have to convince themselves it’s not all bad.

Look the truth is that there’s no way to tell how long people in the past lived. What we have are at best “hints.” Time keeping and records weren’t a big thing for most of human history and what skeletons show (even assuming we found all of them, not about 2% of them) is debatable. What we have — mostly, kind of — for Europe is church records of baptism and death. But you’d be shocked how flexible and shoddy those can be. Not to mention how many get lost.

But those of us born in the middle twentieth century — THE MIDDLE TWENTIETH CENTURY — can give you some hints. Particularly those of us born in less affluent places/times. I can tell you for instance that when someone died in the village at 60 or older, they were “old and full of years” and while it was sad, it wasn’t unexpected. Also I was 14 the first time I saw an 80 year old, and he was a wreck. He sat on a chair and shook, unable to do anything for himself. Yes, there are 80 year olds like that now too, but guys, we see eighty year olds on the regular. The man was a rarity and from a very wealthy family.

Then there is the congratulatory calls when someone turned 100. It was on TV. Like, once every few years. And the person usually looked half dead, or wasn’t 100 at all but they were surmising. Recently someone on our side was holding forth on twitter that anyone who thought they were 100 or more were either lying or it was bad records. PIFFLE. No, more than that, piffle with piffle on top. We know for a fact there are a lot centenarians, because the records in 20th century America were way better than in Europe at the same time, much less before that either place. Now, I don’t know if we’ve broken the upper limit of 114 consistently, and there records don’t help, because we enter the realm of shaky records. However, your local hospital on any given day will have a couple, three, half a dozen centenarians. It’s not that rare. It’s probably more common than 80 year olds when and where I was little. And while 100 is still rare there, it’s also not THAT rare.

This has happened in 50 years, everywhere. I can give you guesses as to why, and it would have to do with better hygiene, better food and ANTIBIOTICS. (Yes, I am in sympathy with the folks in MAHA and I think we eat a lot of overprocessed crap that doesn’t need to be so, particularly since the fad of having things packaged/mixed in China means … well… nothing good. But just simple refrigeration and worldwide transportation of food means we eat fruit and vegetables in winter, which makes a huge difference.) Less physically punitive work, even for those in physically demanding professions. And antibiotics. Most of all, I’d guess antibiotics, from various things, like seeing pictures of people in the past, the size of the interior of cars and how it changed from the 30s to the 40s. Etc. etc.

Look, being sick all the time has a wearing-down effect. Put a pin in this but: by the time you reached ten, as a child in the regency, you’d already have survived ten or twenty SERIOUS life-threatening illnesses. It is stupid — no matter how stupid the not-vax was — to claim that vaccination and herd immunity for children had no effect. And sanitation — clean water, and the ability to bathe at least once a week — was also instrumental in reducing not just childhood death, but continuous childhood illnesses.

The illnesses extended to middle aged years. It seems to me from their mid thirties on, people were never quite well, and were managing more or less serious conditions. Now thirties still counts as young age, and barely past your teen years.

Then there was for men — almost every man — serious every day risks. Even noblemen and the well to do rode horses, which as we’ve established aren’t death machines, but are, as a means of long transportation, far more dangerous than carriages. In addition most of them engaged physical activities even if well to do. From shooting to supervising around the estate, to “sport” which often meant boxing. And every woman who married spent most of her life pregnant or nursing. Unless very, very well to do and hiring nurses.

Activities that we consider quite harmless could turn around and bite you when antibiotics weren’t a thing. President Coolidge’s son died from a blister that got infected. This is unthinkable for a healthy young person in the 21st century. It’s not just unthinkable. It’s laughable. And when Jane Austen says “People don’t die of trifling little colds” it’s supposed to be a laugh line, because people could and did on the regular. This is why colds in her books were treated like life threatening illnesses, with isolation and careful bed rest, and protecting from all chills while recovering. They didn’t do this because they were zany. They did it because there was a serious risk of death.

But even if you didn’t die it left you “shaken” kind of like I’ve been the last two and a half months: weakened so something else caught you. And even if you survived them all, it aged you prematurely and left you aged and ultimately dead “before your time.”

Where I put the pin: You see people like the main love interests in Pride and Prejudice, orphans in full control of their money in their mid to late twenties. And the modern mind immediately scrambles for catastrophic explanations and seems to land, unthinking on “died in a carriage accident.”

BUT for the love of holy Bob, we don’t even know that young man was their first son, and that therefore they were in their forties. It’s entirely possible they had and buried five or six children older than him and that they were in their early fifties or sixties when they died.

I really heartily recommend anyone who wishes to write historical fiction, or even simply to know how blessed our age is, to read historical biographies. The things you discover will be worth it. Things like even in upper class families, fertility might be low because (no refrigeration, no transportation) they often were malnourished (no fresh fruit and vegetables, and “fresh” meat depends on how fresh is fresh.) Women might have countless failed pregnancies before they had a child who lived. And the child who lived might not live very long or die well before the age of reason. So the oldest son and heir in his twenties might be not at all the first born. Again, I like to point when a well brought up girl, of the upper classes sewed her trousseau before marriage, that trosseau typically included a few child shrouds, because she might be too weakened or tired from birthing to sew one for her children who would die at birth or shortly after. IN THE UPPER CLASSES.

Second, explaining death of people in their forties or older (or younger, to be fair) isn’t the hard thing. The hard thing is how in heck these people even survived. Go and look at the report on Czar Nicholas’s remains. The man had massive teeth problems and raging infection probably for years. And he was undeniably one of the wealthiest people of his time, who gave his wife golden, jewel encrusted eggs for Easter.

But all the wealth in the world couldn’t buy dental care that even not particularly well off people can get in the 20th century. Or the benefits of regular brushing and flossing and well-designed tooth care products. Oh, and again nutrition and antibiotics.

Look, if we don’t listen to the siren song of the Marxists, it’s quite possible my kids generation will view living to 120 in relatively good shape (Yes, it’s possible. My parents are still living independently in their nineties, and they don’t live anywhere as well as lower class Americans (though they’re not lower class for their country.)) as “Oh um, so that’s a thing.”

Not common, probably, but maybe around 50% of people will attain that kind of longevity in the next thirty to forty years.

Look, what disturbs me is not just bad fiction. I wouldn’t rage at you guys for that, since many of you don’t even write. Though if you do, please find better ways to kill people in the past than the apparently feral carriages that ran around the countryside in England, attacking and eating humans.

What disturbs me is that most people, even those who think they do, don’t realize what an amazing time we live in.

We are living in paradise, people. Act like it.

And work to stop the sh*theads who want to take us back to “a state of nature.”

Nature is okay, but it’s something that should be enjoyed from a position of superiority not one of need.

And the human animal does best when in a civilized setting. So let’s keep civilization going.

I’m running a mid winter fundraiser for the blog. You know why.

There’s a Give Send Go for the Winter Fundraiser and well, if you need anything else including a snail mail address, please go here.

But I don’t like to ask for money without giving something back. Yes, I know, the blog. But I mean something else. I’ve been ill, and just writing this took the stuffing out of me. BUT here’s a Christmas story. Now I rattle the tin cup.

Whether you donate or not, whether you’ve donated or not, I hope you enjoy the story. – SAH

Of all the times and places to get stuck in, late Christmas eve in Goldport, Colorado had to be the pits.

Alger Monday had been headed to Denver: Denver, where there were hotels near the airport, and there were connections to other airports. But instead, they were told that Denver and Colorado Springs were both under blinding snow and attempting a landing was impossible. And so, here he was about to land in … Goldport Colorado.

A place no one had ever heard of. As his plane circled, he caught a scattered handful of lights on a mountain side. It looked like the sort of place that had maybe a hotel, perhaps two taxis, and had never heard of Uber. If he were very lucky, he’d spend the night sitting in uncomfortable seats in the airport. If he weren’t very lucky… Well, some of these small airports closed for the night. And he’d spend the night sitting on a park bench, or something. If the place had parks and benches.

If he were just your normal business traveler, Alger would have been upset enough. But the truth was that Alger had a condition that made it difficult to fly at the best of times, to stay in hotels for the best of occasions. And to interact with strangers even under the most normal circumstances.

If he became too stressed, or put under any unusual kind of pressure; if he, in fact, lost control of his temper at all, Alger would turn into a small, furry menace to society. Oh, no, not a werewolf. The romance bookshelves were full of stories about sexy werewolves. Some of the more daring ones had stories of sexy dragons or sexy lions or something. But poor Alger had found at 12 that he’d turn into a distinctly non-sexy, completely non-seductive … squirrel.

The first few times he’s woken up naked, draped over the tree branch outside his bedroom, he’d thought he was crazy. His parents certainly thought he was crazy. The number of counseling sessions he had to endure, before he got used enough to the process that he had a perfect recollection of his time as a squirrel. He’d even managed enough control to take a selfie on his phone.

After that, he’d started closing any hole that would allow escape from his room. Which was hard because squirrels could get through very small apertures.

And what sense did that even make. How could a boy become a squirrel? Someone should resurrect Lavoisier and tell him his conservation of mass thing was hokum. If Lavoisier hadn’t been dead — the coward — Alger would have kicked him five ways from… Monday.

At any rate, most of the time, he’d managed to keep himself in his room and out of trouble after that. Or at least, come scurrying back into the room after his nightly adventures. Sure there had been the thing with the neighbor’s cat taking a bite out of his tail, that had kept Alger from sitting down for a week.

But considering his problem, Alger had navigated his teenage years well enough, and much to his parents displeasure, had opted to study computer programing online. Mostly because the idea of being in a college made him so nervous it was hard not to shift just at the thought. He’d researched of course, and knew computer programmers often could work remote, which was perfect. And as soon as he had a job and some savings, he’d bought himself an isolated house, which he’d squirrel proofed as well as possible.

Of course, dating was out of the question, and marrying was not even on his life map. How do you explain to your significant other that at any moment of strife, you’re likely to chitter and twitch your tail at her? Or worse, that you’d had an affair and had another family in burrow in the yard?

Lonely? Of course he was lonely. But he was alive, and had a good job, and could make a living. It could be much worse.

And then his company had been bought by Germans, who, for reasons probably having to do with a ski vacation, had insisted all employees come to Denver for a meeting… On Christmas eve.

It was probably meant to be a treat. The email said, if they wished they could stay over at the company’s expense for up to two weeks, and the company would pick up lift tickets and such.

But Alger had just wanted to stay home. However, his job was very good, and the economy wasn’t. So he’d tried to relax and face the inevitable. And so far the flight had been a success. And then this….

By the time the plane touched down on what seemed to be one of two runways, Alger’s hands were clasping the arms of the seat so hard they probably left indentations. The only thing keeping him from chittering was warm, jovial thoughts of setting fire to Germany. All of it.

“It is very unpleasant, isn’t it?” said a throaty female voice from beside him.

Alger turned to see his seat mate in this puddle-hopper. He’d been concentrating so much on staying calm when he came into the plane he’d not even noticed he had a seat mate. Despite the femme fatale voice, she looked to be around 25 or so. Alger’s age. And she was wearing a t-shirt, and strategically ripped jeans. She’d just pulled a pink backpack from under her seat. And she favored him with a dazzling smile. Her hair was dark brown, her eyes were leaf-green, and she smiled at him, a friendly smile full of comradery.

He mumbled something that could be taken for agreement and sighed, and tried not to let his pulse speed up at all.

“Very small town, Goldport?” he said. “Right?” He had no idea what he was saying, to be fair, only that it must not be in the slightest sexy or encouraging.

“So, so,” she said. “I lived here for college. I just moved to Denver a couple of years ago.” She looked him over and seemed to see something. Alger couldn’t imagine what. But her voice became sympathetic as she added. “Don’t worry. Goldport is very welcoming to strangers. Particularly those– Well, it’s just welcoming, that’s all.”

But it didn’t seem welcoming at all, as they landed in an airport where all the lights were dimmed, the lone coffee stand closed, and a sign said that the airport would close at 10 pm. That was in less than an hour.

Alger took deep deep breaths all the way the luggage claim, where he got his sole overnight bag. He looked up hotels on his phone, but what came up was Leather and Lace twice, one a large hotel, the other a B & B and both full. Lovely.

Park bench it was.

As he got out of the airport, he saw his seat mate get in a car — probably someone she knew — and drive away. He was momentarily upset, before telling himself that he really wasn’t shopping for a relationship. What was he supposed to tell her “I change into a squirrel, but I’m really good at gathering nuts?”

He flagged down a taxi asked if there was some place to eat. The cabbie had looked at him, his expression on the rear view mirror wondering what asylum Alger had escaped from, then said, “Lots of places. What kind of food you want?”

“Chinese,” Alger said, and didn’t even know why. He didn’t like Chinese food that much, but it was the first one to come to his mind.

Which was how he found himself, twenty minutes late, at the edge of town, being let out in a deserted parking lot, where the blinking in and out sign said “Three Luck Dragon.”

The place looked dingy, the neighborhood non-existent and the chances of a taxi coming by here looking for fares was about zero, but by the time Alger thought all this, he was already standing under light snow, in the empty parking lot.

He went in, half expecting it to be empty. But in fact, there was an Asian man, behind the reception desk, watching some kind of sports match on the TV. Alger only had to clear his throat once, before the man turned around and asked “Table for one?”

Alger sat down to a meal of fried rice with “One is the loneliest number” playing in his head. He was so busy in his misery, eating as slowly as possible, while looking out the window at the increasing snow that he didn’t realize two more people had come in.

The first he heard was “Ragnarok business!” shouted very loudly. Startled, he looked up. There were a man and a woman standing in front of the reception desk. They were maybe in their fifties, and looked very upset.

He was almost sure he’d misheard, when the guy who’d brought him to his table sighed and said, in a low, menacing tone, “Are you out of your ever living minds? Do you think the Great Sky Dragon will tolerate this?”

Alger blinked. No. What was this about Ragnarok and great sky dragon? He must have fallen asleep on his dinner, and was dreaming this.

“Well, in time of Ragnarok, there’s time for changes,” the man yelled.

In the next second he knew for sure he was dreaming. As he watched, all three people started coughing. Before he could fully recognize the cough as the one that he suffered from before shifting, the couple had become hyenas and the Asian man had become a dragon. They flung themselves at him, snarling, he– he flamed first one and then the other.

By that time all Alger could think was chitter, chitter, chitter.

As he forced himself to be aware of his surroundings, in was on a high shelf, chittering down and flicking his tail.

He had enough control to know what had happened. The Asian man shifted back to human. He grumbled and got a broom and dustpan to clean the remains of erstwhile hyenas. Then he looked over at the table, and his eyes widened to see Alger’s clothes over the chair.

Then he saw Alger on the shelf, amid some very odd figurines of dragons, and his eyes widened more. As he strode out towards Alger, Alger knew he had only one chance at survival.

Presumably the dragon couldn’t flame his own nose. Alger launched himself at the Asian man’s face, chittering.

He woke up in a dark room, with a splitting headache. And naked. His first thought was that he had died, but that was ridiculous, because he was patently alive.

“Feels pretty gross, doesn’t it, when you’re killed?” the voice of the woman from the plane said from his left side.

He about jumped up a mile in the air, which considering he was completely naked must have been an interesting sight. He landed somehow standing up and covering his privates with his hands. “What– what– what?”

“I wouldn’t be too upset,” the girl said. She was sitting on an armchair, and had been reading something on her phone. Alger realized he’d been lying on a cot and she’d obviously been… watching him? nursing him? “Wan Lee kind of lost his mind, when you bit his nose. But he didn’t kill you seriously.”

“What?” Fine. He’d gone insane. It was the only explanation. “Are you saying someone killed me, but that’s all right, because he only killed me a little?”

The girl’s green eyes opened very wide. “Oh, my,” she said. You don’t have any idea how shifters work, do you?”

“Sh– Sh– shifters?” Alger managed. “I’m not a werewolf.”

“No,” she said. “You’re a were squirrel.” She smiled. “Like I am.”

Unaccountably Alger’s heart sped up and his throat closed and the weird thing was that he didn’t feel in the least like changing. “You are?”

“Oh yes. Here in Goldport… well, there are reasons. There are a lot of us.”

“Do you have any idea what happens to our mass when we get that small?” he asked. And he had no idea why, except he’d always wanted to ask that of someone. And she was definitely someone.

“No. Not all squirrel and rat shifters change mass. The Rodent Liberation front doesn’t. But some do. And no, we don’t know how it works.”

She talked a bunch more. Apparently Goldport was where the Great Sky Dragon, the master of all shifters lived. And she had smelled that Alger was a shifter, which was why she’d been so friendly on the plane. And then Wan Lee had called the Great Sky Dragon and asked for help, and Rachel — the nice girl from the plane — had been in the Great Sky Dragon’s diner, and had–

“Wait! The master of all shifters has a diner? Not a palace or something?”

She hesitated. “There is a palace too, but it was from the last Great Sky Dragon. Tom doesn’t go in much for places. He and his wife own a diner in downtown Goldport.” She perked up. “They have an adorable little boy!”

Among other things she’d told him that most shifters could come back from death, provided they weren’t beheaded of burned to cinders. So while Wan Lee, in a panic, had broken Alger’s squirrel neck, it wasn’t enough to stay dead. “It just means you won’t shift for three days after. It’s kind of the thing.”

She’d waited till he could walk, and she’d helped him dress. Once he was on his unsteady feet, shaking, she’d smiled up at him, “Do you want to go to the diner, and meet everyone else?”

He’d been afraid. After all loneliness had kept him safe. But he liked her. And he liked being able to talk about being a shifter. And he had so much to learn.

In her car — which she said she had borrowed from the Great Sky Dragon — she told him, “Everyone at the diner tonight is a shifter, because it’s Christmas eve and pretty late. So we can all be at ease.”

She was right. The diner was filled with people who all seemed to have heard of his adventure and introduced themselves, and shook his hand. No one was that upset about the hyenas, because, they said, the hyenas were always a bit high strung, and it was a time of Ragnarok.

Alger had no idea what they were talking about, but he didn’t care. Everyone was very friendly, and he was offered three different places to sleep: at the home of a policeman who was also a lion shifter; at the home of the Chinese man who sang some lovely Christmas carols, and at the home of the Great Sky Dragon himself.

Then he chose to stay where Rachel was staying, “It’s a friend’s place, but they’re away for Christmas and gave me their lock code. It’s a two bedroom,” she said.

“I feel,” he told Rachel after dinner. “As though I could move to Goldport, and maybe have a normal life and friends and everything.”

She grinned at him. “Why don’t you? I was thinking of moving back anyway, since my company is going to remote work.”

And like that Alger realized that his flight getting deviated to Goldport was not bad at all. It might turn out to be the best Christmas gift he’d ever gotten.

Make Airplanes Affordable Again? by Jay Maynard

I was drawn by a recent post to X (*) comparing the cost of a new Cirrus SR22T, a modern single-engine airplane that carries four people and a reasonable amount of fuel and luggage, and a Tesla Model Y. The poster complained that the Model Y costs $50,000, or $25 per kilogram, while the SR22T costs $1.1 million, or $1000 per kilogram, and suggests that the airplane is far too expensive. He asked, “An airplane is not more complex than a car, but it costs 40x as much per kg. What would it take to build an airplane for $25/kg?”

I’m a private pilot and certificated flight instructor (CFI), so naturally this caught my attention. He’s got some good points, but ultimately, he’s living in a fantasy world.

Quite aside from the validity of comparing the two by weight, there are plenty of reasons that airplanes are more expensive than cars and probably always will be.

Let’s start with just why you can’t compare airplanes and cars based on weight. To be sure, cars have focused more and more, recently, on shaving weight in the name of fuel economy. In a car, though, there are other considerations which prevent bringing the weight down to the same scale as a light aircraft. The Model Y weighs 1980 kg empty; a Honda Civic EX weighs 1650 kg empty.

The SR22T weighs 1111 kg empty. To get there, it uses composites for its entire structure (aside from the engine mounting cradle). Other light aircraft made of metal are almost universally made from aluminum. I owned an AMD Zodiac Xli once upon a time, an all-aluminum light sport aircraft, that weighed 350 kg empty.

There’s no way I’d take a car based on the construction techniques used in either aircraft onto a Houston freeway. They’d either crumple or shatter in an accident that would do little more than dent the average car. Roadgoing cars’ structures aren’t built out of aluminum or fiberglass for good reasons. This is also why flying cars (or, more realistically, roadable aircraft) have always been a pipe dream, and will always be, at best, a niche product.

Aside from that, though, there are lots of other reasons airplanes are expensive and probably always will be. Regulations, the focus of the original post, certainly are part of them, but far from all of them. To be sure, there are plenty of regulations around certification and manufacture of aircraft, and I agree that many of them can and should go away, but even doing so won’t bring the cost of a new SR22T-class airplane down to even the level of a Model Y.

Type certification, the process of obtaining the legal ability to build and sell an airplane by having the FAA certify its design and manufacturing processes and tooling as safe, is time consuming and expensive. The same goes for the components that are installed in an aircraft. Many of them are subject to a process known as TSO (technical standard order), which is another level of certification for things that go into an aircraft.

The alternator that you’d install in an older Piper Arrow is the same one you can buy for your Dodge Charger, but because it’s TSOd and extra specially tested, the price is tripled. The problem is worse for newer aircraft that have 28-volt electrical systems. There, the parts are different and made in far smaller volumes, so naturally they’re even more expensive.

The old saw about how slapping the label “marine” on an item doubles the price has a corollary: the label “aviation” raises the factor to 10. There’s far more truth to this than is comfortable.

The original post cites the FAA’s MOSAIC initiative, which greatly simplifies the certification process for aircraft, as one that will lower their cost. He’s right, as far as that goes. MOSAIC builds on the current light sport aircraft (LSA) rules to expand them to many more airplanes and many more uses.

My Zodiac was a factory-built LSA, an all aluminum two-seat airplane that could carry me, a passenger, some baggage, and a decent load of fuel. It cost $135K in 2008. I specified everything at the high end, but a base model version would still have been within a steak dinner of $100K.

There are larger issues than this one. The biggest is simple: if you have a mechanical failure in a car, it leaves you on the side of the road with the hood up, but if you have a mechanical failure in an airplane, you get your picture in the papers – and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see it.

This has implications throughout the entire production process. In particular, the kind of quality screwups we tolerate in a car – think the Tesla Model X’s glass roofs that fly off – will get you killed in an airplane. To combat this, there are requirements that the people who build airplanes are specially trained and certified, or work under the direct supervision of someone who is.

Are those regulations too onerous? Quite probably. But you’ll never get me in an airplane built by Tesla.

There’s another factor here that no amount of regulation can fix: liability insurance. At one point in the 80s, the liability coverage for Cessna to build a 172 was *half* the cost of the airplane. That’s been significantly ameliorated by improvements in the legal landscape, but it’s going to be an issue for any aircraft builder, no matter how low the rest of their costs are. We come back to the difference in risk: insurance costs for an aircraft builder will always be higher than for an automobile builder because the cost of problems will always be higher than the costs of problems in an automobile, and the pool of users and aircraft to spread that risk over will be smaller.

That last point brings us to the other major problem in making aircraft sell for the level of the average car. The market is simply far smaller. Getting a private pilot’s license these days will cost north of $10,000. Granted, a large part of that is simply that renting a $500,000 Cessna 172 for $120 an hour adds up fast, but it’s also simply a harder process that takes more time and more commitment than getting a driver’s license.

The post cites MOSAIC again as allowing simplified flight controls that make flight training easier and less time-consuming. While there’s some simplification to be had, it won’t reduce the cost of getting the license nearly as much as he thinks, simply because learning to make the airplane go where you want takes time and repetition, and working in the national airspace system takes learning a lot more than that you have to stop at a red light.

History has a lesson for us here. After World War II, there were lots of people who left the military as trained pilots. The aviation industry shifted from building military aircraft to civilian, expecting a boom in sales that never materialized. The kind of economies of scale that would have made an airplane as inexpensive as a car never happened, either.

With all of this in mind, how low can we get an airplane’s cost? I contend that an airplane of the same capability as the SR22T, even with greatly loosened regulation and some economies of scale, can’t be brought realistically below about $300K. If you cook off all the fat of regulation for regulation’s sake, and just leave the regulations that are actually necessary, there are still a lot of processes that you just don’t have in building a car, and those processes drive up both cost and time to build. That, in turn, drives down the market, preventing the economies of scale that make cars so (comparatively) affordable.

$300K is about the cost of a low-end Rolls Royce. When was the last time you saw one of those on the street? Even my Zodiac cost as much as a fully loaded S-class Mercedes, and it had the benefit of many of the improvements in environment the poster of that first tweet cited.

I’d love to see airplanes made much more affordable, but it’s just not going to happen, for many good reasons.

(*) https://x.com/elidourado/status/1858992139700514873

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FIRST LET’S GET THE SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION OUT OF THE WAY. ALL THESE BOOKS FROM SARAH A. HOYT ARE ON SALE RIGHT NOW FOR 99C. REMEMBER YOU CAN ORDER FOR DELIVERY ON CHRISTMAS MORNING:

Christmas In the Stars: A collection of Christmas Short Stories

This is a collection of four Christmas short stories.
It starts with a star-explorer stranded in unknown coordinates listening very hard for sleigh bells. Then there are two deserters of a doomed planetary war, in a forsaken planet, trying to do the right thing to secure peace and good will, even if one of them happens to be dead. And did you know there was a small, sweet robot at the nativity? Also, sometimes, all you need for a Merry Christmas is a cat.
This is a short collection, but it’s heartwarming and cozy, and the sort of thing to read on a snowy afternoon, by your fireplace, with a cup of eggnog nearby.

Draw One In The Dark (The Shifter Series Book 1)

Something or someone is killing shape shifters in the small mountain town of Goldport, Colorado. Kyrie Smith, a server at a local diner, is the last person to solve the mystery. Except of course for the fact that she changes into a panther and that her co-worker, Tom Ormson, who changes into a dragon, thinks he might have killed someone. Add in a policeman who shape-shifts into a lion, a father who is suffering from remorse about how he raised his son, and a triad of dragon shape shifters on the trail of a magical object known as The Pearl of Heaven and the adventure is bound to get very exciting indeed. Solving the crime is difficult enough, but so is — for our characters — trusting someone with secrets long-held. Originally published by Baen Books.

Gentleman Takes A Chance (The Shifter Series Book 2)

Family! Can’t live with them and can’t eat them.
Tom Ormson, owner — with his girlfriend — of The George, a diner in downtown Goldport, Colorado is well on his way to becoming a responsible and respectable adult, despite his rough start and the fact that he turns into a dragon.
But then the unpredictable Colorado weather, the ancient leader of a dragon triad and an even more ancient shifter-enforcer combine to destroy his home, put his diner at risk and attempt to kill him.
All this, of course, has to happen while Tom’s friend, Rafiel, is trying to solve a series of murders-by-shark at the city aquarium, and Tom’s newly-reconciled father is attempting to move to Denver.
Fasten your seat belts, a wild ride is about to begin.

Includes new afterword by author

Originally published by Baen Books.

FROM JOHN-RICHARD THOMPSON: The Christmas Mink: And Other December Tales from the North Woods

The Christmas Mink and Other December Tales from the North Woods brings the spirit of the season alive. In this whimsical collection of Christmas stories and poems from the snowy north woods of New England, see the season in a new light and find the holiday spirit in unlikely places – in Siberia, from the tail of the Christmas Comet, or even your own tree. In the title tale, The Christmas Mink, young Will, worried about finding a gift for his generous mother, receives a miraculous gift courtesy of a talking mink. In Coal, hapless elves Jeremiah Blizzard and Artie Sleet must travel to Siberia to gather Santa’s supply of coal for his list of VBKs (very bad kids). Follow noble Tobias the donkey on a journey of undeniable importance.Join curmudgeonly old woodsmen, living ornaments, a congress of talking animals, a horde of helpful mice and one grandiose moose in these rousing December tales certain to please both cynic and celebrant alike.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Maze, the Manor, and the Unicorn

A short story of banishment and magical intrigues.

Cecily had been a lady-in-waiting. Exiled to Clearwater — for her health — after she angered Queen Blanche, she has nothing to do but wait.

Until an ambassador is sent there, for his health, and Cecily finds that the court intrigues reach farther than she had known they could.

FROM MATTHEW C. LUCAS: Sword of the Godless

From the dark alleys of a crooked city, to the sacred halls of an ancient seminary, to the blood-stained sands of the arena, Simeon Severals is a hero like no other. It’s a hard life in Lower Bajebluff. Where an outcast boy must fight to keep what’s his, and friends turn on each other to take what’s theirs. But Simeon’s got a sharp mind and a special talent for writing. He’s taken in as a seminary scribe—until a forbidden romance with a noble’s daughter puts an end to Simeon’s life of study. Judged a criminal and cast out of the seminary, he’s sentenced to the Escola, the kingdom’s most infamous school for gladiators. There, the scribe is remade into a warrior. A master swordsman. A champion of the arena, who spits at the gods he once served. How high can a godless gladiator rise before he’s cast down? What weapon can he wield to win his freedom? Who can he trust in the shadowy underworld of the arena?

Matthew C. (“Matt”) Lucas lives in Tampa with his wife, two sons, a dog, and an axolotl. He’s the author of the historical fantasy series, Yonder & Far, the epic fantasy novel, The Mountain, and numerous novellas and short stories that have appeared in various venues. A Florida native with eclectic interests, when he’s not writing, Matt enjoys the outdoors, nineties music, Florida State football, and playing the bagpipes. You can find out more about Matt’s work at http://www.matthewclucas.com.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER, AND ON SALE FOR 2.49 FOR THE REST OF DECEMBER: Family Law

People love easily. Look at most of your relatives or coworkers. How lovable are they? Really? Yet most have mates and children. The vast majority are still invited to family gatherings and their relatives will speak to them.

Many have pets to which they are devoted. Some even call them their fur-babies. Is your dog or cat or parakeet property or family? Not in law but in your heart? Can a pet really love you back? Or is it a different affection? Are you not kind to those who feed and shelter you? But what if your dog could talk back? Would your cat speak to you kindly?

How much more complicated might it be if we meet really intelligent species not human? How would we treat these ‘people’ in feathers or fur? Perhaps a more difficult question is: How would they treat us? Are we that lovable?

When society and the law decide these sort of questions must be answered it is usually because someone disapproves of your choices. Today it may be a cat named in a will or a contest for custody of a dog. People are usually happy living the way they want until conflict is forced upon them.

What if the furry fellow in question has his own law? And is quite articulate in explaining his choices. Can a Human adopt such an alien? Can such an intelligent alien adopt a human? Should they?

Of course if the furry alien in question is smart enough to fly spaceships, and happens to be similar in size and disposition to a mature Grizzly bear, wisdom calls for a certain delicacy in telling him no…

The “April” series of books works from an earlier time toward merging with the “Family Law” series.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Last Pendragon (Legends Book 1)

“The last thing I expected when I went to grieve in the mountains was to get chased by werewolves, kidnapped by a dragon, or meet a legend. But that was exactly what happened.”–Sara Hawke

Sara Hawke, a highly-educated former PhD candidate in Linguistics, is plunged into a situation that strains her skepticism: first she meets a pack of werewolves while camping on the night of the full moon, then she’s rescued by a man the werewolves seemed to fear. Her rescuer then decides that she’ll be good company until he decides to let her go. Then he tells her that she has the potential to be a sorceress, and offers to teach her.

Along the way, she learns that legends aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be, and are occasionally more than they seem…

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Love in the Time of Campaigning

As Frank Correra brings his family to a lunar settlement to get them away from a worsening political situation on Earth, he reminisces about how he and his wife met.

Frank had always dreamed of the skies. As a clone of an astronaut who subsequently became a US Senator, Frank thought he had a clear path ahead of him. But when it comes time to apply for the Air Force Academy, it is an election year. His ur-brother can’t promise a nomination until he’s won another term, and this year promises a hard race to run. When the other side puts up an ugly attack ad, can Frank find a way to discredit it before it destroys his ur-brother’s chance of re-election, and with it Frank’s slot at an Academy appointment?

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: ordinary.

Not doing a real post today. I went to the doctor. I caught a friend’s cold while recovering from pneumonia. Perhaps in a way it was predictable, with still recovering from pneumonia and then my birthday, Thanksgiving, son’s birthday, etc.

Anyway, went to doctor. Am medicated. Post and squirrel (PROMISE) tomorrow or as soon as I poke my head up. It should be tomorrow. We caught it before pneumonia this time.

I have a guest post. Was going to put up, etc. BUT– Being sick makes me even more ADD than normal, so I’ve been all over the place all day.

Anyway, tomorrow. Just wanted you to know I’m okay. I didn’t die in a carriage accident. (It’s a joke. You’ll figure it out when I write that post.)

I have a short story with a squirrel started. (11-D Mailclerk’s fault) though it’s not science fiction. But I’ve managed to catch a friend’s cold, and I was still pretty beat up with pneumonia recovery. So….

I’m going to break my self imposed rule and hit rattle the cup without giving you a freeby. I’m running a mid winter fundraiser for the blog. You know why.

There’s a Give Send Go for the Winter Fundraiser and well, if you need anything else including a snail mail address, please go here.

If you haven’t seen the free reading and the free short story, page down for them. And I’ll have the short story tomorrow, I promise. I just need a good night’s sleep and a late start for a change. (Sorry.)

Oh, yeah, meanwhile, Draw One In the Dark, the first of the Shifters’ books is on sale for 99c.

Something or someone is killing shape shifters in the small mountain town of Goldport, Colorado. Kyrie Smith, a server at a local diner, is the last person to solve the mystery. Except of course for the fact that she changes into a panther and that her co-worker, Tom Ormson, who changes into a dragon, thinks he might have killed someone. Add in a policeman who shape-shifts into a lion, a father who is suffering from remorse about how he raised his son, and a triad of dragon shape shifters on the trail of a magical object known as The Pearl of Heaven and the adventure is bound to get very exciting indeed. Solving the crime is difficult enough, but so is — for our characters — trusting someone with secrets long-held. Originally published by Baen Books.

Today I was thinking about the birth rate, partly because of this.

He is wrong, and right, but mostly right. So I thought I would talk about it a bit. First he is wrong about economic incentives having no point in it.

Yes, you could choose to have ten kids in a hut in the middle of a national forest and you and your husband/wife hunt and live off the land. Given how most of us were raised, that’s about as likely to happen as of a large number of people suddenly sprouting wings and doing away with the need for an airline industry.

But more importantly that ridiculous agro hectoring of “People had children when they were much poorer. Shut up, you young spoiled ones. Have babies on command.” This is roughly translated as “I didn’t have kids when I could, but you should do like my ancestors and birth ten babies and till the back forty. Uphill, both ways.”

Why is it agro, and why is it ridiculous? Dudes. He’s comparing kumquats and quail.

Let’s unpack why people had packs of children when they really logically couldn’t afford it and a vast number of them died of starvation or diseases that took easy hold for being on the verge of them. My mom’s parents had five kids in a space roughly equivalent to the family room where I write blogs and the small kitchen adjacent. Into that space were crammed a small bedroom where the parents slept, a larger room that contained a double bed, a table and china cupboard and grandma’s sewing machine, and then there was a very small kitchen with cement floor, an open cooking fire, and two trunks for supplies, as well as shelves on the wall.

So, did they have children because they really wanted children, longed for them, and the culture told them children were a positive good?

You’re kidding, right? YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING. My grandmother did care for her kids, but I never got the impression she passionately longed for them, and I happen to know she made the older responsible for the younger as soon as she possibly could. My grandfather honestly couldn’t care less. (I loved him, in his old age, but he was a wicked man.)

So why oh why would they have that many? Mostly because contraception was hit or miss and mostly miss, and because grandad wouldn’t let no rhythm stand in the way of his pleasures. I very much doubt if they’d had safe, convenient contraception they’d have had more than one or two. Because grandad wouldn’t want to spend money on them.

The other thing, and the reason this comparison is specious and one more way of saying “you youngs deserve to be poors, so go and have some children and live in a hut.” is that children were a way of making money. Oh, not initially. Initially they took time, money and effort. SOMEWHAT. For instance grandad never allotted money to clothe and look after his brood, so grandma did what she could form odd sewing jobs and such (And work delivering bread, for which she forged his signature, since she couldn’t work without his permission, and he didn’t want her to work because that dented his prestige.) Which meant they were covered and not hanging in the breeze. But they went barefoot summer and winter until they entered apprenticeships at ten.

And here we go into the other point: PEOPLE. Kids earned money. Even those in apprenticeships, you might have to provide some fee up front (though not in Portugal at the time) but the kids got paid. And the money was brought home to the parents. They might be allowed to keep SOME (mom did, so she had shoes) but that was at the parent’s discretion. And kids started earning (in Portugal, in mom’s time. Other places in history it was earlier) at about ten. The end of fourth grade. Note that mom had a scholarship that would have taken her through high school, but grandad chose to send her to apprentice to seamstress instead. (What she made of it afterwards was a business in which she mostly designed and at one point had seamstresses working for her. But that’s what she made of it.) Because it paid. And he got money from it.

Children weren’t some airy-fairy “the culture tell us it’s good.” For most of human history children were economic goods, an addition to the parents comfort and their ability to survive. For a head-spinning moment, go and read colonial biographies. “I’m so sorry my four year old died. He was doing most of the work looking after the cows and horses, and he was very advanced in his study of Greek.”

Put a pin in this. In changing the culture, we need to change our conception of what children are and what they can do. But for now.

About economics: It’s not a coincidence that educated people are having fewer children. Most of them are burdened with student debt TILL PAST THEIR CHILDBEARING AGE. And please spare me the “but sacrifices.” If minimal survival requires both people in the couple to work to service the loans, no, they’re not going to make sacrifices to have children. Because what you’re asking is that they take massive loans…. again.

And again, kindly, if you or your children went through school more than 10 years ago, consider for a minute you might not have a clue what you’re talking about when you talk about how they should “pay up, you deadbeats.” It’s not just that the loans are much higher than you can imagine (when we were young and broke Dan’s relatively small loans were a serious impairment, and they were small.) it’s that starting jobs pay less — sometimes much less — than you think, and than those published “what you can expect to make” surveys say. Those surveys are mid-career salaries, or at least include them. We’ve had an influx of visas targeted to give corporations cheap skilled labor, and imported even doctors (which are trained in very different ways abroad) by the plane load. This is not so much to fulfill a need but to bring the cost of labor down over all. And it works. BOY does it work. Kids starting salaries are lower than ours were, if you account for inflation. They’re about 75% lower. And my generation started work in the post-Carter cratering (due to his insanity and the inflation of the seventies) which means we didn’t start out high. We were broke as heck. Part of this is because I couldn’t find a job for much of our early years, since no one accepted my schooling. (I’m not counting retail jobs which I did have, and without which we wouldn’t have EATEN.) But mostly it was because we weren’t being paid much, and were barely scratching a living until our mid thirties, at least. (With episodes since then, usually tied to some event or other, not what we make.)

Anyway, the kids are worse off.

BUT you’ll say, it’s the culture. If the culture valued children! If people were willing to do the work!

“You youngs deserve to be poors and overworked. Go and reproduce like the beasts of the field.”

Look, I’m not going to argue the culture values motherhood. Put a pin that too. I’ll revisit it in a moment.

But the practicalities of having children CANNOT and should not be disregarded. And kids shouldn’t be told to go ahead and give birth uphill in the snow, because it’s good for them, for humanity, for the older people who are running out of social security, or whatever.

People do things due to abstracts, yes. BUT NOT WHEN THE PRACTICAL IS DEAD SET AGAINST IT.

Look, social pressure — culture — can do a lot. And so can instincts. But they’re not everything.

I’d like to know — really know — for certain what percentage of the population desperately desires children at any given time. 20%? 90%? We don’t know. We actually have no the slightest idea.

I know I was a fairly odd duck for my generation, because I REALLY WANTED KIDS. A lot of them. And we worked very, very hard for the two we have. Including what infertility treatments cost, which weren’t cheap. (Still aren’t, but more common now, so cheaper. Our relatively trivial interventions cost us as much as IVF would cost nowadays.) But from talking to my peers, even in the eighties, when briefly it was expected you’d have children, because it was “the thing to do” I was an ODD DUCK.

So, what percentage of people truly DESIRE to have kids? I don’t know. And neither do you. Because in the past children were both inevitable if you wanted to have sex (which most people do) and an economic value add.

And what is the natural rate of infertility? Absent lack of desire and active contraception, absent abortion and infanticide? Absent cultural imperatives not to have children?

You don’t know. And neither do I. NO ONE DOES. We know now there are slightly better chances of medical science circumventing infertility. But honestly, from my acquaintance alone, even those who started trying early, the improvements achieve no better than a 25% chance of having a kid. EVEN NOW.

In the past? We here of people coming from families that birthed twelve or twenty and two survived, sure. But how much of that is survivor bias? Given most of the records we have are from baptism and marriage from the church, do we know how many couples had one or two despite really wanting many and trying hard? No. More importantly do we know how much infertility was due to marginal nutrition? (The reason I think grandma only raised five and only birthed six over 20 years of marriage.) We don’t know. All this is a blank.

But we can assume from the records of noble houses and kings and queens and even famous people (who presumably were not as inbred as royals) that the rate of infertility was fairly high.

Now look at it on the flip side, regardless of desire.

Now back to that pin we put into children and economics earlier. Children in our current culture are not an economic or material plus. They bring absolutely nothing to the family and are always and completely a drain until … well, you could say legal majority at 18, but because of extended education and the difficulties with finding jobs and supporting themselves, etc, most of our friends are supporting their kids well into their twenties if not thirties. And heck, even we ourselves would have foundered without small, but undeniable monetary help from my parents over the years. I mean, for one, we’d not have had Christmas any year. The reason we could afford the Christmas dinner, let alone gifts for the kids is that my birthday is in November and my parents usually sent me $500 for my birthday, which went for that. (And sometimes for warm coats, though we got those at thrift stores, so cheaper.)

The fact that children are not a plus value materially is partly because we’re no longer farmers, sure. Except where it’s not. Most of it if you look closely is the result of an intrusive government dictating how children and adolescents and young adults MUST be treated, for their own good as determined by experts.

These are laws and regulations established not by any sound research but through sheer alarmism.

For instance, while not advocating for “Dark Satanic Mills” do you realize that there is no proof whatsoever that sending kids to school as early as possible and teaching them as little as possible (no, really. You’re not allowed to go ahead of plan) has produced better results than having the kids, say, help in the family farm and attend school three months out of the year?

A lot of song and dance is made about kids now learning more complex things, but none of it is true. We’re graduating kids AT EIGHTEEN that have learned a complex variety of nonsense, like what pronouns to use and what the politically correct term for someone who sews is, but have no idea how to actually READ in their own language, let alone the rudimentary Greek and Latin of the past. We’re graduating kids at eighteen who KNOW that math is racist, but who can’t do change, calculate the area of a wall versus the amount of paint they need to cover it. All of these skills and far more I’d been taught by 10 in a village school that operated from 1st to 4th grade, four to five hours a day, except the teacher threw us outside to play when we were too noisy and it was fine out, and sometimes recess took two hours because she couldn’t even. In Shakespeare’s day people would know small Latin, a little Greek, a vast vocabulary and how to cypher by the time they were 10.

Sure, they didn’t know how to program computers. And they would be utterly baffled if you asked them to remember individual pronouns, because that’s what we have NAMES for. But most of our kids can’t program computers, either. They can use them, which is different.

Most kids leave High School less informed and far less educated than my mom did at fourth grade. And trust me, mom has massive holes in her knowledge of things from History to science and is weirdly susceptible to “I saw it in a movie so it must be true. They wouldn’t be allowed to make movies that way if it weren’t.” (BRIDGERTON. GAH.) But so are most of the graduates of American High Schools who spent a lot more time in school and learned no useful garment making and designing skills to go with that. And they do exactly the same mental revision of history according to movies, if you look at what they’re writing.

So, the government ONEROUSLY dictates that parents finance 18 years of non-productive learning for their kids. FURTHER MORE the jobs kids can take, which were already restrictive by the end of the last century, have grown insanely so.

It’s not that the kids CAN’T contribute economically to the family. It is that the government doesn’t allow them to, afraid that if they allow kids to take jobs — any jobs — they will magically be enslaved in Victorian mills. It has nothing to do with all of us no longer living in farms. It has to do with the fact that, say, I couldn’t ON THE BOOKS have paid my kids for cleaning the house, and deducted it as a business expense, because I was working.

More importantly, my friends couldn’t pay my kids to clean the house, or collate prints, or typeset or typo hunt for them. Therefore my kids couldn’t be making money, even in early to mid High School when they could have done so. Yeah, yeah, they did some of that anyway, but we had to pay under the table, and there’s issues with that.

Part of the barrier is also minimum wage. You’re not going to hire a fifteen year old with the judgement and attention span of a fifteen year old at $16 an hour. Pay them $5 an hour, and it’s suddenly feasible and worth it. And most American middle class parents don’t even want to take any part of that money. But it’s also good to know if they need it, the kids have SOME. (During a very bad time in my birth family, my brother’s tutoring money kept us in mortgage payments.) Arguably this is good for the kids’ self respect. It definitely is worth it for their education, but it’s verbotten.

Basically, in our regulations, we’re supposed to support our kids through an 18 year long recess, after which they’re automagically economic units and independent. Even that is profoundly unapetizing as a prospect, particularly when you’re young and insecure, and contemplating having your first child. Now add to that that most of us have eyes and see parents supporting their kids well into their thirties, and helping into their forties, and yeah, prospective parents will rightly be afraid.

Then there are other, even more onerous regulations, like the mentally handicapped “Home alone” rules that meant I couldn’t leave my nine and six year olds alone in the house, even with cell phones to be able to call me, and strict instructions not to turn on the stove and such. Again, because of one bad situation these stupid laws impose onerous takings on all the parents. I worked from home, but even so was restricted on when I could shop, when I could work, and what lectures and such I could attend by this stupidity. (Which the parents who are prone to leave the kids in dangerous situations don’t obey, anyway.)

Or add the increasingly hysterical regulations to avoid “truancy.” In Colorado there for a while, anyone could denounce you for having a child with you during school time, and leave it to you to explain that a) the kid was only 3, he only looked 6. or b) that the kid was sick and you stopped by to buy some canned soup on the way from the doctor or c) you were homeschooling and the kid was having school while out with you.

In fact the governmental “well meaning” (EH!) burden of “how to raise your child” regulations is so heavy that it adds to taking away a good half of a parent’s time, and by itself completely circumscribes the number of kids you can have.

Take the whole “Never physically punish the child.” Look, I’m not advocating beating a child, but particularly in the pre-verbal or pre-understanding years, a swat to the bottom stops dangerous behavior quicker than a time out or a philosophical discussion that can’t happen in the middle of the grocery store, anyway.

Yes, there is a thing called “Gentle parenting.” Yes, it works wonders. But it doesn’t work wonders for every child. (It worked on my second. Not my first. My second took redirection like a pro. The older one not so much.) Not every parent is capable of it. And government dictation on “you can’t do minimal physical correction” MOSTLY results in children growing up without any physical discipline whatsoever AND parents living shackled to the kids just to ensure they don’t accidentally kill themselves or others.

So what we’re rowing against is not “Parents have to be willing to make some sacrifices for children.”

It’s “Parents who have some amount of desire or at least ‘eh, wouldn’t mind’ for kids are committing to supporting another human being for possibly thirty or more years with no economic benefit and a lot of possible social and criminal liability.”

GEE! You say birth rates are falling? Shocked, shocked.

It must be lack of yelling at young people that their ancestors had kids while being much poorer, and why don’t they get with making babies?

Then there is the social. This is the part where he’s right. The culture is not just sternly against it, the culture has eliminated the image of women as a separate creature from men. No wonder we don’t know what women are, or think it’s all a construct and about clothes and stuff.

It’s not. Women’s entire biological role is built around having children. We medicalize it and thwart it at every opportunity, and treat the fact we were born female (those who were, obviously) as a condition that prevents us from being as sexually free as men, and achieving as much as men do in their “careers.”

This has been going on a long time. As I said, in the early eighties, I was an Odd duck. Furthermore, I was afraid of talking about how much I wanted children, because you see, I was a “smart woman” TM and wanting to have children, much less stay home and raise them was a-priori proof you were either stupid or abused by the men in your life.

So I kept my mouth shut.

Smart women were supposed to do what men did, sleep around and have a Splendid Career, particularly if it was in a male area.

I don’t know why. I didn’t then, and I still don’t. In retrospect, and having done it, I can’t imagine a more splendid career than raising smart and (within the limits of possible) functional kids. Or more satisfying.

Having worked as a corporate drone and as a freelancer, let me tell you, there ain’t nothing splendid about a career. Most women — and men too — trying to nourish their soul on “corporate” success meet only with grinding, boring mediocrity. And your competency and intelligence count for less than your ability to meet changing corporate fads and doctrines and a general ability to suck up. I’m not bitter or disillusioned (for a free lance writer I had more success than most, and indie has freed me further) I’m talking about what I’ve observed with friends and family over the years.

Can we change the culture? Yes. But we must stop telling various lies to people.

Lies?

Sure. We must stop telling people careers are inherently satisfying. That every job leads to a “career” instead of leading to making enough money to afford to live and build a nice life outside of work (or at least paying our own way.) That family is inferior to having some kind of material, externally defined success.

Further, through our entertainment, literature and art, we need to stop focusing on the bad parts of family. Families, like all human institutions, are flawed and can be bad, yes. But why focus on the bad? I can tell you with absolute truthfulness that this chronic depressive (Still unmedicated) would be dead as a doornail without her husband and kids. Years ago. There have been bad times, yes. I worry about the kids, yes. Sometimes I fight with my husband, yes. But on the whole, I derive more … joy, more authentic happiness from them than from anything else I’ve ever done. Sure there’s good and bad, and no one is asking you to show the good only. But why show the bad only? And why weight the bad more? It’s not artistic. It’s not mature. And culturally it’s suicidal.

More importantly, we need to stop telling people they’re going to be twenty forever and never die. I’ve seen people age. I’m aging myself. Let me tell you, sure you have friends, you have your group, but old age without descendants feels cold and bleak. As I age, I find I lean more and more on the kids emotionally if not financially or physically (YET) because I KNOW them better than I know anyone else. And because family is where they have to take you in when you show up at the door.

Look, it’s not just “someday you’ll die.” It’s “what you want will change” and “given current rates of survival, you have a good chance of being “old” and increasingly frail for about half of your life. Being a corporate go getter who sleeps around stops working more and more as those conditions set in. And having someone you saw growing up and can trust intrinsically becomes more valuable.

So, stop telling people they’ll be “forever young”. It’s not true. You can extend it to your thirties, kind of, but no further.

And yes, changing the culture will help, though the only way to do it is one on one, creator by creator, person by person. We’re not going to suddenly flip over to “and then everyone.” THAT’s not how it works.

On the other hand, there are those economic factors. And no amount of screaming at the kids they should live on less and have MORE kids is going to overcome the fact that having kids is a huge financial burden, or will consume most of the financial life for 30 years or more, depending on how many kids and how spaced. Or that for about 18 of those they’re rendering themselves criminally liable in a million ways that no human being wants to be. Like I STILL HAVE NIGHTMARES OF DROPPING MY KID AND HAVING HIM HURT HIMSELF FATALLY. The specific nightmare involves the kid suddenly throwing himself backwards, a thing toddlers do, and my not catching it in time, and kid hitting his head on the hard floor and dying. Yes, the nightmare is horrible enough, because I don’t want my child to die. BUT in the dreams I’m always also aware I’ll probably be arrested and tried, on suspicion of having done it on purpose. Because well, some people do. And the law is an ass. I usually wake up screaming. But I’ve also had friends who were called in and reported for screaming at their sixteen year old. Or because someone doesn’t approve of how they keep house. Or, yes, because they were out with a school age kid, during school hours. This doesn’t include the time husband gave younger son nursemaid’s elbow because he thought he was awake, and tried to pull him up. (He wasn’t. Arm got dislocated.) We took him to the pediatrician fully expecting to be arrested. (We weren’t. Pediatrician was sane. But that’s increasingly rare. And they’re hemmed in by mandatory snitching laws, that never seem to stop the errors but throw up a million false positives.)

NO ONE WANTS THAT. No one sane wants to put themselves in that kind of hock.

Also, no one, NO ONE knows what a joy their own kids will be till they have them. As much as I wanted kids, I had no idea how much I’d love them, or how much joy raising them would bring me. And it’s something you really can’t explain. (If I’d known I’d have tried harder. We’d have hocked the house and the cats to be more aggressive on infertility.)

So, it’s something where the rewards are unclear and hard to communicate to someone else. BUT the liabilities are clear, in your face, and often very realistically material.

Gee, I wonder why the kids aren’t having kids. Maybe if we shout at them and shame them more?

Or perhaps we can work to get government off their backs, become sane about regulations which the bad actors ignore ANYWAY, and try — to the best of our abilities — to easy young people’s path into a rewarding working life, and make it easier for them to have kids without being watched like hawks by karens every step of the way?

And perhaps, just perhaps see what we can do about forgiving or at least commuting the student loan penalties (for most people incurred when so young they could have no idea what they were doing, and a larcenous, lying business anyway. And, listen, the money has been spent. Ultimately it was the government printing more money to give to colleges. The value has been inflated away.) Help them find jobs. Train them if needed (the expensive universities don’t do that.) Introduce them to likely people of the opposite sex. (Look, I try, but I’m limited.) Help them a bit even if (only) as my parents did to us.

Lobby to ease the regulations on working from home. So mothers can do it. Lobby to ease the regulations on teens working. And allow them to get a somewhat lower wage the first years of work. (There shouldn’t be minimum wage anyway!)

AND GET THE D*MNED GOVERNMENT OFF THEIR BACKS.

Whether the young people of child bearing are yours or not — so many of us have no kids, or had fewer than we wanted — don’t shout at them. Give them a hand up. Help them feel the security needed. Make having kids less daunting. Don’t require they go live in a cabin in the forest and wash their clothes in the creek. You wouldn’t want to do it, why should they? Require no UNREASONABLE sacrifices.

And write movies and books about the joy of having and raising kids. It’s the type of thing art can convey when logic can’t.

We must, must turn this ship around. For the future.

So there will be one.

*Sorry I’m late with a free short story. I have one about a shifter squirrel started, but this post wanted out. And then it was Yuge. Sorry. – SAH*

I have to confess that for a while now I’ve been reading the lefty laments on the election with every measure of enjoyment.

Listening to them rage, howl, and throw themselves on the floor screaming that those d*mn disobedient peasants voted for Trump for “the price of eggs! They voted for eggs!” is comedy gold when you look at it from the POV of the lefty planners and strategists really being spider creatures from Alpha Centauri who landed yesterday and are trying to understand humanity.

On the other hand, a young friend also laughing at them unearthed something that took that enjoyment and strangled it, and shoved it down my throat to become absolute and utter unreasoning anger. This post is the result of that.

What my friend first posted in a private group was this:

Guys guys
I just learned the most hilarious term
“Treatler”
It’s about people willing to overlook Travesty and Injustice and Racism because they like their “treats”
…like they literally made up a term for “liking nice things makes you Hitler”

She — younger than I so less prone to yell at the sky, I guess, thought this was hilarious, and went diving for more of the insanity. And found it.

(Vague recollection of nice things being “treats”–unimportant, antisocial–was this unhinged Twitter discussion years ago about … I think it was year-round bananas being listed as “treats” people would have to do without to combat climate change)

From UrbanDictionary:
Coined by left-wing twitter, “Treatler” is used to describe people whose extent of political ambition is about their selfish want of fulfilling their consumerist desires, even at the cost of lives.
Guy 1: Who do you plan on voting for in the coming election?

Guy 2: I think i’ll vote for Mr.Smith. I know he said those things about how he wishes to genocide minorities, but he said he will make gas 15 cents cheaper by the end of his term.

Guy 1: You’re such a fucking Treatler.

And this is where I went insane. In fact, this is where I went Librarian Poo!

Look, ignore the stuff about the candidate saying he wishes to genocide minorities. Anyone who has been through a couple of election cycles knows the left says that about anyone who opposes them, regardless of if the person, him/herself is a minority. In fact, of course, it is the left once its regime is firmly established that always sets about exterminating and running down minorities. (No? Ask what it’s like to be gay in Cuba, what it was like to be black or Jewish in the USSR, what it’s still like to be gay in Venezuela, or for that matter what it was like to live in a black neighborhood in the US during the hot enthusiasm for St. Floyd of Fentanyl.) What are they really saying?

They’re saying that someone wanting to be able to afford necessities like gas, or wanting to buy a little extra — bananas! BANANAS! for the love of holy frig! — with the money THEY EARN AND WORK FOR is wanting “treats.”

As though the vast majority of working people were some kind of toddler under the care of a benevolent kindergarten teachers, waiting for “treats” for good behavior.

What the actual tri-plated, reinforced, damned gal of these would be aristos! TREATS?

Eggs, aren’t treats. Affordable gas isn’t a treat. Bananas aren’t treats. They’re the basic building blocks of a decent life and decent nutrition made possible for the working man and woman by free trade, innovations in transportation and drilling, and manufacturing. They’re the earned fruits of civilization built by our forefathers and foremothers with insane work, the sweat of their brow and ingenuous innovation.

They’re not the aristos to give or withhold. They are not — or should not be — under the control of any unelected bureaucrat and they should not be restricted or affected by any precious regulation, no matter if the people who came up with it thought that doing it would bring about utopia.

“Climate change” is not an excuse to restrict people’s access to have they have earned should be able to buy in any sane system. The people’s PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, which, yes, includes full bellies and a sweet treat now and then, shall not be impaired. Other things that aren’t a sufficient excuse for government to restrict people’s liberty to buy what they can afford include but are not limited to: inequality, redistribution, racism, and “its would be nice.”

In fact, it is the Lords of Despair, the purveyors of Utopian pap who are the toddlers, screaming and rolling on the floor, demanding that others do what the toddlers say or they’ll hold their breaths till they turn blue, or scream for endless hours on Bluesky and the like, and sneer at us with a mighty sneer.

And no matter the reasons they say they want to deny the population these “treats” — TREATS, could they have come up with a more infantile name? What a window to their infantile worldview and the infantilization they wish on the rest of us? — the true reason is because they want to be the only ones who have these things, and therefore be special. They want to be the favorite students of kindergarten teacher government, and get all the gold stars and be able to preen and act special.

This is because they know at their heart they are the least useful and creative people imaginable. They demand privileges and a pedestal because they know anyone on the street is better than the yawning chasm that passes for the soul they sold to the gods of envy.

Well, since they’ve never studied history and have a sketchy grasp on linguistics, let me point out Utopia means “No place.” And in fact, every place they have attempted to install this “utopia” of their has turned to hell on Earth.

It’s time and more than enough to shove the utopian aristos aside (From how high, and with what strength you shove them is a decision I will stay out of) and allow people to enjoy the blessings of liberty.

People are voting for their own self-interest. Of such things is civilization created. Because no one knows what each person wants or needs than that person. No philosopher, no king, certainly no bureaucrat can guess or decide such things for the individual. In fact, the very system of voting is based on the thought that each individual knows his own interests best and should be allowed to have a say in governance to preserve them.

Yes, it is licit, what’s more, it is highly moral to vote for a candidate because you think he/she will make eggs and gas cheaper, jobs more abundant, bananas easier to buy. The ultimate goal of any human civilization is long-lived, healthy seniors and lots of fat and happy babies. Only those allow us to build and improve, and reach ever forward so the species shall not be extinct.

Anything that stands in the way of that is an evil not to be countenanced.

So, go ahead, you shit-headed aristos. Go ahead, call me a treatler.

In return I will call you what you are: You are an unserious utopian, a too-early-weaned toddler rolling on the floor of kindergarten, demanding the other kids give back those gold stars, because onlyyyy you deserve them!

Or if you prefer, you are a cankerous worm fallen from the rotten ass of Karl Marx, and if given your way you will turn all of the Earth as dismal, sterile and dead as that thing you call a soul.

It’s time you were told the only place you get to rule is no place. It’s time your rolling around screaming were stopped and you got a good spanking.

If you’re very lucky, the spanking won’t be administered with a tire iron.

Hey, guys, in a major case of brain slippage (I’ve caught a friend’s cold. Yes, I know. I should be in a bubble till I’m fully over whatever this is) I forgot to tell you I put Christmas In The Stars on Sale for 99c, and it’s been on sale all day.

If you guys already have it (probably, since it came out last year) it’s fine, but hey, it’s Christmas. You might even want to give it to someone. I think you can even set it for delivery on Christmas day. Or Christmas eve. So…

Christmas in the Stars: On Sale for 99c.

This is a collection of four Christmas short stories.
It starts with a star-explorer stranded in unknown coordinates listening very hard for sleigh bells. Then there are two deserters of a doomed planetary war, in a forsaken planet, trying to do the right thing to secure peace and good will, even if one of them happens to be dead. And did you know there was a small, sweet robot at the nativity? Also, sometimes, all you need for a Merry Christmas is a cat.
This is a short collection, but it’s heartwarming and cozy, and the sort of thing to read on a snowy afternoon, by your fireplace, with a cup of eggnog nearby.