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Why is liberal California the poverty capital of America?

California, with 12% of the American population, is home today to about one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients.

I moved to California in 2000, and out of California in 2004. When I moved in, I had to live an hour and a half away from work (each way), because I couldn’t afford anything closer. When I left, the housing prices had skyrocketed to a stupid degree… there was no way I could have afforded my own 1,200 square-foot dinky domicile. The weird thing was… when I moved into that neighborhood, I was one of many homeowners who lived there; when I left, I was the *last* homeowner who actually lived there. Instead, every house had been bought by landlords who rented out the houses to low income people. Shortly before I left I spoke with the new neighbor, who was paying about 1/4 what I was per month to rent a clone of my house, which the new property owner had paid much more for than I had for mine. The reason why this insane system could possibly make sense for the landowner was because the state shelled out vast sums to people who rent out “low income” housing, making up the difference paid by the renters and allowing the owners to make a profit. Where did that money come from? Local property tax payers.

Insane.

The war on booze led to… lots of booze. The war on drugs led to rampant drug use. The war on poverty? Led to poverty. California is leading the charge to the victory of poverty. It’s racing towards turning into a real Haiti-hole.

A 1966 Aerojet concept for a space probe with a nuclear reactor and ion engines. Note the largish thermal radiator “wings;” such things are usually left off spacecraft in science fiction, but they are a vital part of any nuclear spacecraft. Nukes, after all, are simply heat sources; in order to get useful electrical power out of them, the heat must be used to boil a working fluid which runs a turbogenerator; and the hot gas then needs to be condensed back to a liquid by radiating the heat way to space. And thermal radiation is a terribly slow and weak process, necessitating large radiators. Electricity can also be created with thermionic systems, which generate electricity across a thermal differential… hot on one side, cold on the other. But unless the cold side it attached to some radiators, the cold side will soon be just as hot as the hot side, and then… no thermal differential, no power generation.

Note also that even with a substantial powerplant and the sizable bank of ion engines, acceleration is going to be creakingly slow. Thus you can get away with spindly structures. The reactor itself is the tiny little tin can-looking thing, top and centerline; the U-shaped structure around it is a radiation shield protecting the electronics, structure and radiators from the radiation spat out by the reactor.

Port-Au-Prince: A City Of Millions, With No Sewer System

Port-au-Prince is about the size of Chicago. But it doesn’t have a sewer system. It’s one of the largest cities in the world without one. …

The cumulative sewage of 3 million people flows through open ditches. It mixes with ubiquitous piles of garbage. Each night, an all-but-invisible army of workers called bayakou descend into man-sized holes with buckets to remove human waste from septic pits and latrines, then dump it into the canals that cut through the city.

Yikes.

North Valley church’s electronic bells too loud, neighbor says

The pastor said he’s responded to the complaints by lowering the volume and moved the bells from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., but he says they’re not going to turn off the bells completely.

Wonderful neighbors.

Centuries ago, I *suppose* there might have been a purpose in religious places instituting loud blaring “calls to prayer.” But we have these things now called “alarm clocks” and “phones” and such. So the use of such systems *now* smacks less of reminding people what time it is, and more of “lookit me, lookit me.” I wonder if the primary handbook of Da Church has anything to say on the subject. Hmmm…

6:5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
6:6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
6:7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

Everybody has a role to play. Mine, it seems, is “cautionary tale.” So when I say to learn from my mistake… well, I guess I need to be more specific. So, I’ll just stick to the one that wound up consuming my entire Friday and into Saturday.

After unfortunate experiences and scares years ago, I’ve long since separated my internet computer from my work computer. If something horrid and malicious comes through those series of tubes into my internet computer, it might make a mess of my ability to go online and whatnot, but hopefully it won’t hop to computers with my drafting and CAD modeling and the like on them. So far that has worked.

A bit short of a year ago I found a “chromebook” in a pawn shop for all of fifty bucks. It was relatively new and had a bigger screen than the dinky little netbooks I’d used for internet work, so, after a factory reset (wiping out everything on the computer, including – presumably – spy and malware), it became my internet computer. And it continues to work fine, with only one problem: the hard drive is pathetically small, only 25 gigabytes. With just the most basic set of programs loaded on, more than 20 gig is already consumed. It’s forever trying to update Windows, but it can’t… the update requires 8 gig free, and there simply isn’t that much space available on the drive. A poor design, IMO.

Due to the space limitations, one of the USB ports has a tiny little USB drive permanently installed. All downloads are directed there. This drive, smaller than my thumbnail, has 128 gigabytes of storage space, which makes me wonder why the built-in drive is so tiny.

Anyway, the USB drive is slowly filled with images, videos and PDF files. Every few months I go through what’s on it, clean out the junk and save the save-worthy to other drives for permanent storage. I was going to do that this weekend. Friday morning, one of the first things I did was to take a look at the “download” directory for a file I’d downloaded from a government report server a while back. I saw a few things that weren’t needed so I deleted them. And that’s where things went wrong.

After i hit “delete,” it should have been just a quick flash, then done. But it took long enough to attract my attention… and I saw “now deleting 18 gigabytes.” Somehow the system decided to delete all my downloaded files, not just the one. I killed the process as fast as I could, but the bulk of the directory was cleaned out.

With a regular hard drive, this would be a minor irritation… just go into the “recycle bin” and restore the files. But with a USB drive, there is no recycle bin; it simply wipes out the files.

There are programs such as “Recova” that should, in principle, allow for the recovery of deleted files. when a computer deletes a file, the file isn’t truly gone; it’s still there, but the space it occupies is opened up for other files to come in and over-write. So since I started the recovery process essentially immediately, those deleted files *should* have been recoverable. But… they weren’t. The files were found, and a handful were ok, but the great majority of them were *somehow* already over-written, by files downloaded days ago. I don’t get how that works, but there it is. Hundreds or thousands of files were wiped from existence.

The remaining option: Firefox keeps a record of all downloads. In this case, back to early November. So I compiled a list of all the PDFs I’ve downloaded and started downloading again. That took hours.

Then the fun part: I had to go through all the PDFs. Most of the ones I downloaded were of no value to me, so when I’d originally downloaded them I looked through them and wound up deleting them. The record of downloads didn’t make that distinction, so I had to scan them all again, and again toss most out. Again. And those I kept, I had to copy out into PNG format all the images (diagrams of aircraft and spacecraft, naturally) that I wanted. Again. It’s now well into Saturday and I’m *mostly* done re-doing this work. Gah. The directory with the reports and images is now at 14 gig, meaning 4 gig has vanished. This, I presume, is due to files I downloaded prior to early November that Firefox no longer remembers. Gone for good, I suppose.

So, there ya go. Learn from my mistake and don’t do what I did.

Hmm. WordPress says the preceding blather amounts to 770 words, or a bit over two novel-length pages. One error caused by one erroneous keystroke consumed a day and resulted in two pages of probably unreadable text. I suppose if I find I can make a go out of my fiction writing (I’m still waiting to hear back about some editing for my first novel), I might take a stab at writing advice books. “Learn From My Mistakes, volume 1: Career” and “Learn From My Mistakes, volume 2: Romance.” Sure to be big sellers.