Just to get a post out there...

Borrow something instead of buying it.

Make sure you return it, no one likes that guy who steals your shit.

hover.com sucks ass

If you need a domain, go somewhere else, they keep locking me out of my account - fuck those losers.

Unemployed

Unemployment is the scourge of the day. Look where ever you like and there will be a story about job loss and many have already made up their minds who is to blame. The culprits are as wide afield as you can get, Bush to Obama, Illegal workers to the labor unions, Wall Street to Foreign investors and every millimeter of the spectrum in between but maybe the problem isn't as simple as that?

Technology has changed society and automated most tasks, things like going to the bank and getting gas - replaced by a machine interface. Rental cars, airlines and movie tickets, all available online without having to interact with anyone. Nearly everywhere a repetitive or confrontational task is you can find a machine doing that job, like going to the registry or paying a parking ticket. Convenience rules the day and most don't seem to mind scanning their own groceries, it saves time, right?

As for American industry, we are all happy to see someone else do the dirty work. Not even the people who are out of work buy American, they all head to Walmart to get cheap, chinese crap because it costs a few cents less than the Made in U.S. stuff. Frankly, it is often of far greater quality, American's expect too much pay and all that workplace safety stuff isn't cheap. American cars are a good example of just how crappy our industry can be, no one was surprised when that tanked. It isn't only American cars, U.S. financial products have become pariahs on the world trading floor. No one wants to touch that crap either.

Piss poor management can't be discounted. How many times have I had to work overtime to cover a boss' mistake? I would argue that a lot of the problems we see are the fault of a few idiot managers. It's no secret that big companies hired way too many people to get a bump in stock or they eliminated lower level managers and heaped too much responsibility on the already overworked staff. Poor handling of other people's livelihood was certainly more of a factor than anyone wants to admit and to blame the "economy" is like blaming the weather. If you are laying off a few thousand employees - my friend, the problem might be you.

While we're admitting unpleasant realities, there is the problem of personal incompetence. I lost plenty of jobs to a shitty attitude. Maybe I didn't like the boss or the task or the circumstances but in the end it was usually my fault when I got shitcanned. Not to mention the mistake of getting a job and thinking it's yours forever, it's always a good idea to stay abreast whatever industry you are in and if you require someone to print out emails then don't be upset when you're not the boss much longer.

The point of all this being, things change. Sometimes it sneaks up gradually, sometimes it's all at once. If you should be good at anything - be good at change. The job that pays the bills today might not be there tomorrow and anyone who thought they could go on working at the video store forever - they thought wrong. We all want the easy life, the American Dream, the big fat paycheck without a lot of hard work but that is not how it is to be. While you were on hold with the support guy from India about that Chinese computer it all slipped away...

Energy Audit

Most electricity suppliers will give you a free "energy audit" to determine where and how you can save electricity in your home. Because the place I live is a sort of apartment building where all the units are virtually identical it was easy to make a lot of progress with one visit. We all got free compact fluorescent light bulbs and they installed some new thermostats, which was cool. I mention this because - it works. Saves them extra work supplying juice and you could save yourself some money-honey, so contact your electric people and see what they have to offer.

Moral: Sometimes we all win.

Oil is Finished

This oil spill is a holocaust. 11 men dead, an ecosystem destroyed, possibly forever and the damage continues with no sign of stopping until August. The cynicism and incompetence demonstrated by the oil industry is beyond the pale and I personally think the responsible parties should be put to death for their crimes. There will be no public hangings though, nor will there be recompense - dead birds don't cash checks, our system is too dependent on oil.

Why then do I assert that oil is finished?

I made up a thing I call "generation bias" (just now I did). It's the preference that a generation gives to a common cause, based on similar environmental conditions and life experiences. I didn't live before the civil rights era and have no problem with my kids going to school with black kids even though my parents generation did. Indeed, its hard for me to make sense of exactly what all the fuss was about, different color skin, so what? Pick a cause and the generational bias will be there:

- Cuba for example was about the spread of communism. Find me anyone under the age of 15 who even knows what communism is, let alone why we should fear it. To the young, communism gives us inexpensive electronics from China not the red menace that inspired fear and the resulting invasion of southeast asia, followed by that stupid "cold war" which just siphoned resources away from more important things.

- Gay marriage, only old people who go to church seem to have a problem with this because they confuse marriage with the sacrament of matrimony, where a couple is joined in the eyes of the lord god in an unbreakable bond. Fifty years ago it was the only way you could get laid with any regularity because no one did it before you were married. Now marriage is less religious and you don't go to hell if you divorce, I would argue that same sex marriage saved the ceremony from cynics.

- Privacy, this is one that catches me. Young folks don't seem to care about protecting their privacy like I do. My generation didn't even like to have our phone numbers public but kids today have mobile phones set up to constantly update their current location. This gives me the willies but really, why should I be concerned if people know where I am (since I am usually at home anyhow)? Not like I'm ducking a death squad...

This is my basis to assert that oil is finished. My generation is sick of oil but we aren't as versed in alternative fuels. We even call them "alternative" which should not be the nomenclature for wind, hydroelectric and solar power - all proven forms of power generation. The young will see this disaster for what it is, A DISASTER. They will grow up knowing that fossil fuels are that, FOSSIL FUELS. Petroleum and its industry as a whole has given us the gulf war, the recent spike in oil cost that ruined the auto industry and the mine collapse that killed all those men because they were trying to save a few bucks by not venting the shafts. We won't live to see it but our kids will do away with this stuff. They will view as quaint and filthy, like vinyl records, an artifact of an ignorant older generation.

Moral: Use less fucking oil, shit is nasty.

Back on the Stick

As the first minimalist blog in the fucking universe I feel compelled to restate my purpose. There are a few other minimalist blogs out there now but back in the day there was none and a search for minimalism bore some disappointing fruit, just new age nonsense and heavy eastern philosophy cut and pasted from gutenberg.org.

I did this because I was moving and I was a slob and didn't want to carry all that useless junk up three flights of stairs, instead I declared myself a minimalist and confronted my irrational attachment to clothes and books and all sorts of miscellany that defied definition. I started to write about it because it worked. My big empty house looked clean, the few things I kept were organized. Instead of spending hours sifting through piles for a tool to fix another thing in another pile that I didn't even really need, I had all this free time. I was inspired and sought out other ways to change, keeping all this goodness to myself seemed... rude.

Next came a hundred or so posts about biking and clothing and grocery bags that really weren't that interesting, in the last few years I really wasn't a minimalist at all, my place was crowded with junk as I settled into old habits, got fat and lazy and started grabbing things out of the trash again. The walkways and piles reappeared and I became hypocritical. To my credit, I did stop proselytizing minimalism to people when I discovered I had lost my way - but here I am again! Reborn!

This time there was no move, only a steady slow build of loathing. The retail shopping experience is a particular source of unpleasantness but to post the simple fact that I don't like something without some kind of viable alternative was really just a waste of everyones time. Who the fuck cares what I think, I don't care what you think, I even turned off the comments and never check my email. I wouldn't want to read about how much you hate the TV show you just saw or how you bought an iMac and it was not the quality product you'd expected. Its a matter of courtesy.

There is a need for minimalism now, that is what changed. The "new poor" are not adjusting well to their new financial status and the youth don't learn shit in school about the simple economics of the home. People need to know how to reconstitute dried beans and make soup, they need to know that biking is cheaper than driving to the gym to ... ride a fake bike. That things you buy in the store can be FIXED when they break and you don't need to buy a new one. Green blogs are mostly bullshit, selling bamboo novelties and solar knapsacks (GOD, how I hate those things....) and its really just the same model with different suppliers. A cellphone that gets buried in the ground and a plant grows out it? I'm sorry but that is stupid.

This is me getting back on the stick.

Moral: Don't say it if you're not going to do it.

It is not widely practiced but those compact florescent bulbs are not supposed to be thrown away, they are supposed to be recycled. They contain trace amounts of mercury which isn't dangerous but over time it can build up in landfills, not to mention the particularly horrible methods used in mining mercury. The problem is - not many places participate in the recycling programs, in my area there is only the Home Depot.