[FRIAM] The last Lighthouse Keeper in America

Wed Dec 27 18:28:33 EST 2023

Rambling Ode to (mostly) Trucks:

On 12/27/23 10:59 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> What I saw on my trip were hundreds of late model giant pickup trucks 
> jacked way up off the ground driving around 90mph with the usual markings.
>
> How do the proles afford them?  Not yet post-scarcity.  Hmm.
>
Re: LMGPTJOtG - Last time I drove the corridor you describe I remember 
having my doors blown off by one of those "cowboy cadillacs"  with 
bumper stickers reading /_Trump 2016_/ and _/If it ain't King James, it 
ain't Bible/_.   I'm sure there is a Trump 2020 and 2024 sticker on 
there (or overlayed) now.

Re: Bible tangent -  I recently bought a used Bible off the interwebs 
for reasons I'm sure you don't want me to elaborate here, and learned a 
bit too much about the myriad *modern* translations/editions and 
versions,  with KJ influencing them all significantly.   I chose a 1951 
version the Catholic Church produced to try to align with Protestant 
versions without letting go of any of their own principles/tenants.   A 
sort of peace offering?   I was raised agnostic-unto athiest but 
surrounded by Protestants and Impinged with Catholics until I started 
choosing escaped/reformed/recovering Catholics as partners as an adult.

Re: Can't wait for the machines to take over- When we invented gods in 
our own image we did a bad job, I'm not sure we are doing any better 
with the AI?  Please gods, not in Elon's image!  But hope springs infernal.

Re: REC Banks/Culture -  glad to hear someone else is as voracious as I 
am with Science and Fiction... my library still holds a dozen or so 
books from REC's library when he left SFE (10 years ago?)... but I don't 
remember any SciFi, just SciFact?

Re: Eric's cryptic comment about "last keeper of Democracy being a Black 
Woman - " Michele, Oprah, and Kamala seem like the likely candidates in 
exponentially decreasing order of likelihood?   I see an 
adjacent-possible path fitting Biden's and the DNC's handling of 2024 
strategy?   When does Biden step down/out?  After Trump implodes 
entirely?  After election?  Some acute aging-related event?  If Haley 
squeeks the primary away from DJT? While she might qualify as "woman of 
color", not Black and not particularly a "keeper of Democracy" unless of 
course, we measure such by small handfulls of shred?  I'd want Kamala to 
beat her, but not sure where all those Trumpster-Dumpsters would come 
down?   Some probably couldn't vote for *any* woman?

Re:  Big Trucks and post Scarcity -  On our last road trip, Mary's 
favorite cousin (our age) arrived (Northern NE) to meet us for dinner 
one of those cowboy cadillacs... looked like it had been in a 
bar-fight.   Golfball and bigger hail the week before he said.

He had just come from the insurance adjuster who offered him a $50k 
check for the repairs (spangled windshield, ball-peened hood/roof, and 
some minor pings in every panel and toolbox)... which he was upset about 
since replacement was $70k.   Not a single functional issue outside of 
windshield visibility.  I'd have had a $500 windshield put in, paid off 
the loan (which I would never have taken out, myself) and worn the 
beating like a sabre scar, but he was dead set on getting it repaired 
whilst grumbling at the downtime when he'd have to drive one of the 
(equally big/expensive) company trucks (he owns a tree trimming service, 
so it would host a bucket and chipper, slows him down on the 
straightaways?).

I didn't check for bumper stickers but am pretty sure they would say 
Trump/Pence with Pence struck through with a Sharpie (maybe a noose 
drawn on?).  He might have missed the small Biden/Harris one on the back 
of Mary's ($5k new to us) 15 year old Prius (215k miles and no hail 
damage)... I just smiled when he railed about the cost of fuel (a lot of 
"I did that" Biden stickers on the gas pumps there) thinking about the 
50mpg I was getting unless I drafted behind a truck like his (then 60)...

Mary is excellent about not talking politics with family... most of her 
generation of relatives (and all of their survining parents) are 
died-in-wool conservative and about half of the next generation are 
too.  One tween grand-niece sported a "I'll be Baaack Trump-Terminator" 
T-shirt when we met up with them... I'm pretty sure it was for our 
benefit.   I wanted to send her a Dark-Brandon one to round out the 
closet, but Mary thought she might/not recognize the snark in it and 
either way it would be futile.

Love of Pickup Trucks - I grew up with pickup-trucks as the best 
value-versatility vehicle, usually the first/only for any family with 3 
little kids squeezed between mom and pop on the wide bench seat and 
grandparents and older kids in the back in the slipstream of the cab 
sharing a blanket.   Camper shells/toppers didn't come into vogue until 
a few years later, that made the back a little more hospitable.   None 
came with power steering, brakes, windows, AC, automatic transmissions 
that I knew of, and an (AM) radio was a luxury... but no preset stations 
and a single speaker under holes drilled in the (metal) dashboard.

None of my own half-dozen pickup trucks have ever been "luxury" by 
contemporary standards but as time progressed, all those power/automatic 
features became *standard*, hard to avoid and the MSRP's went up and 
past that of any compact and many sedans. Increasingly newer (none of 
mine were newish much less new) and more capable (starting with AM/FM 
stereo and 4x4 and extended (not double) cabs) with my latest being a 
2002 diesel 4x4 (250k miles) once converted to veggie oil.   fryer oil 
became scarce for a while but then at some point all the old hippies 
hoarding the stuff started trying to give it away by the 55 gallon drum 
a few years ago.  If they had sat in the sunlight too long they probably 
had algae growth.  Not good for injectors.  It is hard to keep the 
pumps, injectors, seals in good shape with veggie instead of dino oil 
with/without alge...  even if Rudolf Diesel (1858) did design the first 
ones to run on peanut oil.   I sure wish I'd not help Reagan oust Jimmy 
in 1980!

I'm not sure when pickups became self-indulgent luxury toys.  I 
love/owned motorcycles too.  Same/Same.

My 49 2.5 ton farm dump truck (mostly lawn ornament now but often used a 
decade ago (by me) for woodchips, manure, firewood) is on it's way to 
becoming (fingers crossed) Double Axle II, a second in the fleet of Axle 
Art <https://www.axleart.com/> projects.

Current Treatment of Axle Contemporary Van

DALL-E has a strange sense of humor about a lot of things, including 
which direction a dump-bed dumps!... my proposed performance art-project 
is called "sequestering carbon, two cords of books at a time".

Color scheme and body style are accurate, specific Patina and stenciling 
entirely made up by DALL-E...  many renderings offered.  The only other  
obvious inauthentic element is the bolt pattern on the rims... 5 giant 
self-centering lug nuts were the standard for this class of truck well 
into the 50s.

These rims are known as widowmakers... for good reason, surprisingly 
Garcia Tire still maintains a cage with mounting equipment inside to 
work on them with.   I'm looking for modern replacements.  But they will 
still have a 5 bolt pattern.

I've been waiting for larger affordable "hub motors" to come out so I 
could quit tuning a 75 year old petrol burner and drop in the good 
sections of my 16kWh Chevy Volt battery I replaced when I bought it.   
Used (but still functional) solar panels are cheaper than plywood and a 
whole lot more water-proof.   I could cover or clad the bed with those 
and collect enough photons for the 2-6 mile moves every week or two the 
art-platform concept suggests? The split-drive-shaft and two-speed 
rear-end with PTO setup is also a reasonable place to inline an EV-class 
motor for low-speed, short distances.   Who knows?

Locals should look for this pressed into some form of transient public 
art installation in Santa Fe by this summer.

'nuff of this careening ramble,

  - Sieve

> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Roger Critchlow
> *Sent:* Wednesday, December 27, 2023 9:28 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The last Lighthouse Keeper in America
>
> On Tue, Dec 26, 2023 at 8:51 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> 
> wrote:
>
>     [...]
>
>     Really hoping the machines can take over soon.
>
> I just yesterday finished rereading all the Iain M Banks "Culture" 
> novels in the Boston Public Library e-collection, seven between 
> Halloween and Christmas.  The "Culture" is a space-going far future 
> civilization of organic life - humanoid and other - and of 
> artificially sentient beings.  The machine "Minds" pretty much run the 
> infrastructure and economy while the organic beings party, study,  
> travel, pursue dangerous hobbies, whatever. It's all post-scarcity, so 
> everyone can pretty much have what they want.
>
> It sounds like the Culture "Minds" pretty much solved the dictatorship 
> of the proletariat in the Culture's history.  You raise dumb matter to 
> sentience and let it sort everything out.  The energy and matter of 
> the tools that the proletarians used are even more prole than the proles.
>
> -- rec --
>
>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoomhttps://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribehttp://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIChttp://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru presenthttps://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>    1/2003 thru 6/2021http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20231227/139c6830/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: DALL?E 2023-11-18 19.33.38 - A modified version of the previously described scene, featuring the Ford F-6 model farm grain bed truck from the 1950s with a yellow cab and red bed. .png
Type: image/png
Size: 1875284 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20231227/139c6830/attachment-0001.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Poetruck with color copy.jpeg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 58235 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20231227/139c6830/attachment-0001.jpeg>