Timmerov's Blog
motherhood
giving life to another human being is the greatest gift one person can bestow upon another. it's just that: a gift. it can only be given voluntarily. we cannot draft someone to motherhood anymore than we can draft a soldier to war. as repugnant as abortion is, we cannot ban it.
homosexuals
the idea of a homosexual relationship just gives me the heebie jeebies. gih! but hey, whatever floats your boat. just don't make me think about it. okay? on the other hand... homosexual couples contribute to the gdp. they don't reproduce themselves. they are the ultimate genetic altruists. they adopt children carelessly created and discarded by heterosexual couples. so in that very real sense they have the moral high ground. and put us to shame.
abortion ban
i wonder what the cost of an abortion ban would be. uncomplicated births cost about $8,000. add the gdp cost because mom isn't working for the next 18 years. some of the kids will be wards of the state. add that cost. enforcing the ban will cost money. add that. more people leads to less goods per person leads to less happiness leads to more crime. what does that cost? imagine this: britney tells cletus she's preggers. cletus freaks. kills her. how do we add that cost? an illegal and unsafe abortion can kill you. what cost? parents treating a kid like he's some unwanted piece of shit they would have rather trashed than kept. what cost?
overpopulation
it's pretty clear there are too many people in the world. we use energy to feed ourselves. as energy gets more expensive we'll produce less food. eventually we won't be able to feed everyone. we need to reduce the number of people. there are two ways to do that: (1) increase the death rate, (2) decrease the birth rate. the republican war plan seems to be to (1) by armed conflict, genocide, famine, disease, etc. the republican abstinence only policy is counter to (2). it increases the birth rate. the republican plan is to create people for the purpose of killing them. that's sick.
code optimization
should you optimize your code? yes and no. i ran into the case the other day where "optimizing" the code made the program run slower. the "optimized" routines pushed the formerly fast enough routines out of the cache and made the whole program run slower. pretty neat, huh?
soda recipe
refrigerate 1 liter of water. microwave 1/2 cup of water for 60 seconds. add 2/3 cup sugar to hot water. let cool. add 4 ml of unsweetened concentrated flavoring. i get mine from
rio. refrigerate. the liter and the syrup mixture must be cold. carbonate the liter of water. slowly add syrup. mix gently. drink. refreshing! the 4 ounce sample bottle of flavor makes 6 /gallons/ of soda. about 2 months. remember to replace other sugary drinks with the soda. don't just add the soda to your diet or your ass will get too fat to fit in the kitchen. and i'll make fun of you on my blog. ;->
$3 gas
i paid $3/gallon for gas today. i predicted this price for last summer. i was only about 15 months early. heh. may all my other doom and gloom predictions be off by a factor of five.
inflation
i've made the prediction that our oil consumption per capita will halve in 15 years. unless we can double our energy efficiency we're going to do half as much. we'll travel half as often. eat out half as often. build half as many new cars, houses, planes, phones, computers, etc. if we consume half as much our economy will be halved in size. but our debt will still be there. in absolute dollars. if we don't inflate our (now decreased) income we will succumb to the cost of servicing the debt. that rate of inflation is 5%. lower bound. assuming we don't take on any more debt.
oil consumption
we should consume oil as fast as possible. so it's gone before the next generation of consumers is born. and we can move past this gluttony phase. quickly, before there are even more of us.
hydrogen
i gave a presentation about energy sources the other day. someone asked, what about hydrogen? hydrogen is not a /source/ of energy. there are no hydrogen mines. no hydrogen trees. no hydrogen wells. we have to make the stuff. we make it from natural gas. or from electrolysis using gobs of electricity. it's much more efficient to run cars on the original natural gas or electricity.
radical intimidation
bush said in a recent speech that radicals were seeking to intimidate the world. bush, you're a radical trying to intimidate the world. resign.
men in black
heh. i've been posting lots of gloom and doom lately. i'm reminded of a line in the movie men in black. the young agent's going nutso trying to save the world. the experienced agent finally catches up to him. the world is always about to be destroyed! so my question to myself is: am i the young agent that just noticed peak oil is about to end the world?
elite
world population is increasing. world energy production isn't keeping up. obviously that means that less energy is expended per person. that's a pretty good measure of standard of living. the rich are the ones with the highest standard of living. they control governments. they are not going to let their standard of living go down. what will happen is they will trim their ranks. they will reduce their own numbers so the standard of living of the remaining rich people stays high. watch the american middle class become poor.
energy tax
it costs energy to get energy. you have to drill wells, dig mines, manufacture solar cells, windmills, dams. this energy cost is a tax on the energy source. sweet light oil had the lowest tax in the history of the world. about 1%. it's been going up as we've been consuming it. we're in the 3% range now. oil and natural gas production are peaking. that means their tax is going up. the tax on coal is 5% to 10% depending on how clean you want to be. the tax on solar and wind is about 20%. hydrogen is 200%. large scale biofuel is 1000%. think about it.
standard of living
our standard of living is determined by three things: total energy consumed divided by population times efficiency with which we use that energy. the energy we can consume is limited by the amount the world can produce. that last part is going down. population is going up. both indicate our standard of living is going down. the good news is we use energy terribly inefficiently. we'll increase it. or we'll be poor.
iea
the iea recently changed its prediction for peak oil from 2040 ish to by 2010. except for saudi arabia (duh!) we seem to have a consensus. peak oil means higher prices means economic contraction. that's harsh. but we can cope if we plan for it. are we planning for it? nope.
miers
bush is a moron. he obviously has no grasp of the power of the supreme court. or no respect for it. if he did he would have put up one hell of a fight to install ultra conservative justices. thusly ensuring right wing conservatism dictated down our throats for decades. or maybe he found a fraction of a spine. or maybe we've all been hoodwinked. again.
heaven
i've been pretty pessimistic about the future in some of these blogs. here's a random thought. 1965 might be the greatest time in history to be born. we had just started tapping the oil windfall. the standard of living went to the moon. i'll die sometime around 2045. just before things get really bad. maybe it's not a coincidence. maybe this is heaven. or maybe i'm a simulation in some advanced creature's computer experiment: will he save the world? or will he party like it's 1999?
oil slaves
our standard of living can be defined by the number of oil slaves we command. currently we each have about 200. i'm gonna make some rather simple minded assumptions and use a very simple minded model and toss out the claim that in 15 years we're going to have only 100 oil slaves. i can't predict the absolute price of oil. but it's not relevant. the interpretation is that everyone's income will be effectively cut in half. what would your life be like if half your income went away in 2020?
father-in-law
my father-in-law's great. he calls me every year on my birthday. he doesn't wish me a happy birthday. he just wants to talk to alisa. i used to think he failed to remember my birthday and just happened to call that day by coincidence. but it's been too many years in a row now. so i think it's become a goofy tradition. i can't really pay him back. his birthday is christmas eve.
g's shoes
garrett wore out and grew out of a pair of shoes with cute flashy lights. we thought there was a piezoelectric crystal in there that produced electricity every step to light the leds. so i cut up his shoes to find it. but no. there's a big old battery hidden in the heal. and now the garbage dumps are full of these batteries slowly leaking toxins. fuckin' brilliant.
200 slaves
americans consume 25% of the world's oil. each barrel of oil represents 15 man years of labor. that works out to each of us having 200 virtual slaves. they push our cars, cook our food, build our homes, keep us warm or cool, make our tv shows, build our roads, etc etc. the neat thing about virtual slaves is they don't eat. unfortunately, they're dying out. try to imagine what your children's life will be like with only 100 virtual slaves. teach them how to grow their own food.
sneaker joke
so this is a classic joke. an oldie but a goodie. i'm sure you've heard it before. i'm gonna tell it anyway. it's a beautiful day and two hikers are walking through the woods. suddenly, this angry bear jumps out and charges at them. both hikers immediately scream, crap pants, and turn to run. the first hiker stops to exchange his boots for sneakers so he can run faster and gets eaten by the bear.
spanking
poor garrett. he pissed all over his brother and all over the bathroom. sometimes kids just do really dumb things. he got a spanking. he hasn't gotten very many spankings in his four years of life. but this qualified. the important thing after disciplining your kid is that once the punishment is over, it's over. completely. he had to help me clean up the bathroom. we made it a game. and there was no more lecture or talk of punishment. i got to read him books that night. usually he always picks mom. so i guess he still loves me.
cold
so i had a cold this week. my productivity goes way down when i have a cold. so i usually do mindless chores that need to be done. like dust my office. the problem with dusting is that it makes it even more difficult to breathe. pah.
8/10
i saw a statistic that implied every 10 minutes of exercise increased your life expectancy by 8 minutes. the author of the article said he did the math and pretty much gave up his trips to the gym. apparently, he would rather die than exercise. well he'll get his wish. maybe he's too stupid to figure out that playing tag with his lover on the beach counts as exercise. as does throwing ball with his kid. darwin.
fat ladies
when i was a kid i wondered why obese women would bother with make up, perfume, nails, etc. a little polish isn't gonna change the fact that she's grotesquely fat. so what's the point? it dawned on me at the bank yesterday. they're not competing against super models. they're competing against other fat ladies for the best remaining potential mates that can't score a super model.
dnd
so i ran a dnd adventure where the party is supposed to escort this helpless girl from point a to point b. and along the way the bad guys are supposed to kidnap her. this plot device never works. those darn players are always all over it. but it worked! more/less just like they way they wrote it up. i swiped the girl right out from in front of them. crazy.
rita v katrina
perhaps it's a coincidence that the government blew it when it came to hurricane katrina. (gawd, that was an awful pun!) katrina struck poor democrats. and two weeks later the government's got its act together with hurricane rita and we're getting minute by minute reports on the health and safety of all those texas oil refineries. or perhaps it's not a coincidence.
2004 election
heh. someone in the news business eloquently pointed out that in the 2004 presidential election we had a choice between a warmongering draft dodger and a peacenik war veteran. would that my keyboard could produce such gems.
amp
i got an amp for my birthday. i'm used to amps that have one button: on. this one's crazy. i could plug every other audio and/or visual component we own into it and still have unused i/o ports. strangely, it doesn't have an input specifically for analog audio. which is the input i want to feed it. tv works.
