S'scusi, dove il bar?

The song "not now john" by pink floyd is stuck in my head
today, or more specifically the refrain that says "Fuck all that!"
sung by the backup singers.

Nobody hurt he says

Glenn Reynolds mentioned this article in the NYtimes that shows
how fewer mexicans want to go to the USA now, there are more opportunities
here in Mexico, fewer in the USA and the border region is dangerous.
(I'd bet on number 3, no matter how bad the economy I don't imagine many
suburbanites doing hard labor like picking lettuce for $2/hr)

Glenn then snarks that our employment situation is bad enough in
the USA that Americans will soon be sneaking across the border the
other way. I nearly snorted some coffee out of my nose when I realized
he was talking about me. I nearly had a job offer in the USA last
year when Macondo happened, and then the blowout killed any chance
I had. The deepwater drilling ban killed our operations offshore,
and got a lot of people fired/retired/transferred out.

When Obama implies that no one really lost their job due to his ban,
he shows his ignorance of how the world works. A minimum wage cleanup
job is not the same as technical offshore worker's wage. So thanks
Obama for keeping me an expat. (I'm not saying he shouldn't have
stopped drilling to review the licensing process, but he could have
done it like I suggested here last June)

Slip sliding away

The New Orleans times picayune has a good article on
the Morganza spillway, with a map showing where the water
will be diverted to lower the risk of flooding in New Orleans.

I didn't know that the Morganza spillway and Atchafalaya spillway
cover almost the same route. I lived for a couple of years
in the atchafalaya spillway in Butte La Rose (french for Rose's
Butt, I don't know who Rose was). It was pretty stupid to live
there, it was a great fishing camp, but I was single and working
offshore. When I got home, there was no food and it was 15 miles
to henderson on a levee road, so I subsisted mostly on what I could
buy at the local bait shop, beer and chips.

When I first moved there I fished almost every day from the dock.
Fishing and drinking is quite respectable, but after a while catching
fish really just got in the way of drinking. Also, since
my water discharge line was right below the dock I never ate anything
I caught, I think I just caught the same 5 fish over and over.

I crushed all my cans and kept them, thinking I would recycle them.
Finally I gave them to an old guy collecting cans on the side of the
road. Two 50 gallon bags of crushed cans, I thought the old guy was
going to kiss me.

Luckily, the owner asked me to move out because someone wanted to buy
the camp, and I moved back to Lafayette, otherwise I'd probably still be living
out there, or working as the assistant of the old guy picking up cans
on the side of the road.

I'm glad it looks like Butte La Rose won't be as flooded as
they were predicting earlier in the week. I really liked it out there,
it's just not a good first home.

You can never go home again

Coyote blog has a link to a great set of pictures at
"how to be a retronaut", all taken in a video arcade cerca 1982.

Since I spent most of my disposable income one quarter at
a time, that brings back memories. What game was my favorite
depends on the year...Galaxian, then Galaga, Asteroids,
star castle, elevator action, any game where you got to
sit down and pretend to be a pilot for 3 minutes. I was
probably best at Star Wars, but I cheated by working at an
ice cream shop that had that one game. If no one was there
I was playing. (I should have studied instead, the Jedi
never came to ask my help)

Game of thrones

Mexico was a week ahead on Thor, and it's a month behind on
Game of thrones, so I didn't get to see the first one until last
night. Not bad. Everything according to the book, graphics
look good, some decent acting. I detected a slight drift towards
a revenge of the sith filming technique, Darth Vader horribly
burned... check. Direwolf puppies found...check. It was
good enough that I'm looking forward to next Sunday.

Strangely enough, I watched Clash of the Titans right before,
and I liked that movie. Much better than the other version with
the guy from LA Law. (I summon google...shazam...Harry Hamlin)
(Why doesn't google do that, right mouse click, google search my
last sentence. Shazam.)

The next book in the Song of Ice and Fire series comes out in July.
It's something I'll have to buy on the kindle just for safety reasons,
a hard-back 1000 page book can easily smother you if you fall asleep
while reading. Kindle, it's for safety (tm).

Twitterfied

I signed up for twitter, @joegremlin. I don't know how much
I'll use it, but it seems much more phone-sized then blogger.
By the time I navigate to blogger on my phone and peck out a few
words I've forgotten what I wanted to say. Twitter is already
limited to about how much I have time to say, so it could be a
good fit.

I'm following several financial type people (Cramer, Alltucher, Ritholtz,
and a few celebrities. Best thing I've seen is Marina Orlova @hotforwords.
I didn't know etymology could be so interesting.

We'll see how it goes, I spend so much time traveling that I don't have time
to blog, I should be able to twitter more frequently. Same basic topics,
no work or family, just travel, finance, politics, books and movies.

Hi Ho, the son of a bitch is dead!

I've never been so happy to hear about someone being killed.
I went to bed before they announced it, so I woke up to a chat
message from my wife saying "felicitaciones!"

Off to buy some sweets to bring to work.

Ravenna, revisited

I'm back in Ravenna for a conference this week, the weather is
cool and crisp, all the Italians are beautiful in their
scarfs and boots, the only change I can detect after 6 months
absence is my bank has been renovated and the people that work
there have become efficient and friendly. (2 years here, no one in
that bank was ever friendly, is there something in the water?)

I went to visit our old neighbors and they gave me an excellent
lunch, spagetti a la speck and vitello and about 9 glasses of
wine and noccino. I need to go up to the office and say hi, but
I suspect I'm too drunk to go at the moment, I may have to go
in the morning. doh.

I like Mexico, the people work really hard, and I fit in because
I look like I could drive a bus there. I really love Italy, I
just could never fit in, everyone here is tall and elegantly
dressed, and even if I bought new clothes here I'd look like a
bus driver wearing Italian clothes.

Italy is like a country filled with the cool people from high school,
all dressed right, even if it's a battered old coat they manage
to pull off being cool. The food is just right, wine is perfect,
but every time I try an italian wine outside of Italy it's crap,
as if here is a bubble of perfectness, once you carry things out
of here they take up the local properties. Maybe Italianness isn't
exportable like French wines or irish beer.

Machiavelli and Muamar

It looks like Sarkozy is actively starting the no fly zone
over Libya. I think it's too late and the USA will lose credibility
and create another enemy, from yahoo:

After weeks of hesitation and divisions among his advisers, President Barack Obama on Friday endorsed military action against Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, saying U.S. values and credibility are at stake to stop "the potential for mass murder" of innocents.

I hope it's not, but I think it's too late to help the rebels,
and without going all the way for regime change we'll have pissed
off a guy with a lot of oil income and an army, we'll be looking
at blowback for the next 20 years. As Machiavelli said:

"Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge."

If they had done something a few weeks ago, it would have been
like Afganistan in 2001, just a few cia guys with laser designators
and a few planes with LGB's. Muamar's forces are mostly mercenaries,
just a few magic bombs that kill large groups with unerring accuracy
and they would have headed back home without waiting for paychecks.
That's really the only hope here, (it would have been much easier
back on the coast road though) as Machiavelli said:

mercenaries are disunited and without discipline; bold among friends, yet cowardly among enemies; they have no fear of God, and keep no faith with men. In a word, they are unreliable. If a nation, against his advice, relies on mercenaries for its protection, it keeps its ruin at bay only so long as it can postpone an attack.

(I couldn't find the exact quote, my copy of the prince is still in
a box amongst 25 other boxes of books. I really admire Machiavelli,
when I toured the Palazzo Vecchio I was very interested to see his
office. The Prince is biting satire, but still mostly good advice
if you want to be evil)

It really annoys me that no one in this super intelligent administration
read the prince, or read the history of the africa corps in WW2.
The coast road is the key, the rest of the country is desert. All
of the battles were at one end of the road or the other, in the
middle they were chases supported by air support. It would have been
easier to redeem the full faith and credit of the USA if things were
done two weeks ago.

If I were king, I'd go all out now and shut down the Libyan air force
now and land the marines behind the mercenaries south of bengazi. I
would bet they'd fold up their tents and go home without us having to
retake a city by force.

Japan Syndrome

I was thinking that the worst thing that would happen
would be a melt down that would stay in containment, but
this guy says it could be worse:

If workers are unable to get additional cooling water into the reactor vessel, the molten fuel core will collapse into the water in bottom of the vessel. Eventually the heat from the decaying fuel would boil away the water that's left, leaving the core sitting on the vessel's lower head made of steel.

Should that happen, "It'll melt through it like butter," Allen said.

That, in turn, would cause a "high-pressure melt injection" into the water-filled concrete cavity below the reactor. Because the concrete would likely be unheated, the reaction created by the sudden injection of the reactor's ultra-hot content would be immense, he said.

"It'll be like somebody dropped a bomb, and there'll be a big cloud of very, very radioactive material above the ground," Allen said, noting that it would contain uranium and plutonium, as well as the fission products.

I'll say it now: GAH!

That sounds uncomfortably close to what was described in the China
Syndrome.

Tsunami and nukes

Here we only have Fox and Cnn international and
neither one ever says anything new, they keep talking
about the nukes, when even the worst case exposures would
be a few REM. I've worked with logging sources, and over
about one year I got around 600 mREM, to no negative effect
(twitch twitch). When they mention a dose of 400 uSieverts,
that is a pissant's fart worth of radiation.
[edited after I had a cup of coffee, i meant dose, not rate]

What they seem to be missing is the rest of coastal northern Japan
has been nearly wiped out, the nytimes has an article about
several small towns that were hit by 60' waves. I don't see
how the death toll can't be less then 30 or 40k. Hopefully
no one in the government or the navy is watching Fox, they
need to move ships and helicopters to the more remote towns
where they can do some good.

I would bet the only real danger would be to the 50 guys who
have to go in and fight the fires and keep the plant cool. I
hope they are rotating them enough that no one gets more than
several REMs, and not doing the chernobyl technique of sending in
50 men to die.

Tsunami

I'm trying to work on a presentation for next week, with
around 20 ppt presentations open as I shuffle slides around,
but I keep going back to various news sites to see what is
happening in Japan. The videos of the tsunami are much worse
on the net, when they showed the water crossing farmland on
CNN friday it looked like a thin film of water seeping across
fields.

My scale was wrong, watching the full video on
the web, the water is carrying houses and cars and even a
boat that must have set the record for farthest inland boat.
In the video, finally the water approches another town with
a highway with cars that are stopping because they see that
the thin film of water is bearing down on them. One white
car pulled off the road, reversed direction and was last seen
leaving ahead of the water, but the helicopter cameraman
didn't keep him in frame. The guy must have had a pretty
horrifying rear view mirror view.

Even in the most prepared country in the world, if the disaster
is big enough no one is coming to help for 3 days. yikes.
We're out of the Oughts, this crap should stop now.

President Carter redux

I'm watching CNN as the worst case scenario seems to be
unfolding in Japan. Once again the question is edging towards
"why isn't the US Navy there yet?", and the CNN announcer doesn't
seem to understand that the Pacific is freaking big, anything not
there in Japan won't be there for a few days.

The next story blinks up; Qkadafy is taking the city of Ras Lanuf,
and I really don't see how the rebels can win without outside help.
One side has more modern weapons and air support, the other side has
15 year old boys and 30 year old weapons. I'd ask again, where is the
US Navy?

Two big problems doom the rebellion in Libya by preventing outside
assistance (meaning help from the USA). The intervention clock has
been reset to 1990, it's a bipolar or tripolar world again and we need
the consent of Russia and China to work through the UN. (not happening)
We also have the 1990 post-vietnam(Iraq) perspective of we don't want
to get involved in something that probably would become a quagmire.

The other problem is Arab fatigue. We really don't know the language,
culture or beliefs of anyone there, and my give a fuck level is very
low with anything that happens south or east of Italy. Neptunus Lex
says it better:

It would be the profoundest irony if, after having broken our hearts and the bodies of our youth for nearly 10 years now in the Middle East we have come to the conclusion that “these people” cannot be saved at precisely the same moment when they finally became ready for salvation.

Because that’s what just happened, if you weren’t paying attention: We’ve gotten tired of them. We’re tired of their ululations, their savagery and their conspiracy theories. We’re tired of their backwardness, sloth, dependency and fatalism. We’ve gotten tired of trying to accommodate a modern day, pluralistic and tolerant society to the religious dictates of a military adventurer dead some 1400 years.

The same people that called me a facist motherfucker in 2003 are the same
dickheads saying we should intervene in Libya. My GAF level is low enough that President Carter's dithering over the problem doesn't send me writing emails
hither and yon to various congressmen that could be representing me. More of
a sense of a missed opportunity, we've recreated an enemy in Libya by Carter's calling for him to go, but didn't do anything to make him go. I don't think the current President Carter included "The Prince" in his extensive, elite education.

[just to translate from Joe to english: I'd support support the current
President Carter if he'd do his job and swat khadafy duck, and I think that
is a consistent position. Hussein was a dick and he made war on us, we made
war on him and now he's gone. Khadafy is a dick, and has made war on us off
and on for 30 years, he should be made to go, not told to go. Don't do a
powerful enemy a small hurt]

War. huh. what the hell it's good for, absolutely nothing

I'm watching Anderson Cooper and the same dickwads from
eight years ago are on there, (wolfowitz and wesley clark)
how we should invade libya or give arms to the rebels or
set a no fly zone. Clark mentioned that he doesn't want
troops in there until there is legal support from the UN.
Of course the US had UN resolutions against Iraq that supported
removing Saddam, yet now 'War is Good'. grrrrr.

If the USA is going to attack Ghadafy, the congress should pass
a declaration of war. People that are for it now can't say later
they didn't vote for WAR, they voted for war. Declare war, say
the aim is to take Ghadafy out of power, then the 6th fleet sweeps
all aircraft out the sky over Libya and drops an LGB on daffy duck.

This video says it all

Oil, Oil everywhere, i'll take me a drink.

Jerry Pournelle has a nice short essay about the craziness
going on around the world. Just to quote the end:

I long ago concluded that we are not capable of guarding the liberty of the people of the Near East, and that we ought to develop our own energy resources. I see no reason to change my views, although it will be far more expensive now. It will only get more expensive in future. We need to drill for oil, build nuclear power plants, and develop natural gas. Those ought to be our first priorities. Once we have energy we can use it to build those green facilities that we are told will save the planet, but if we cannot save ourselves, we certainly cannot save the planet.

I like reading JP probably because I agree pretty closely with
what he says, and he's able to say it without stupid or offensive
jokes. He was against the Iraq war from the beginning, I was
lukewarm for it until it started, then I felt the war should be
supported without being lukewarm.

Where we agree most strongly is on energy. The lunacy of sending
billions of dollars per month to countries that would nuke us if
they could get away with it is astonishing. Having to watch every
oil industry cycle where the price goes up and then crashes, each
time more of the US oil industry is destroyed and we end up importing
more.

Energy is the key. We've got a few trillion left on our mastercard,
we should be building up energy self sufficiency. If the dollar is
worthless at some point, imported energy will be prohibitively
expensive and it might be too late to stop the final spiral down
to 19th century agrarianism, with internet. (very little travel,
and what does occur happens by slow train) "The sheep look up" by
John brunner type outcomes. Or is it Stand on Zanzibar?

Part of the problem is politicians and people enjoy the point in the
cycle when everything is crashed, and gas is $1 again. All the
alternative energy industries reset back to zero, and people go
back to buying hummers (not the good kind). I'm with the greenies
slightly in thinking that fuel prices need to be higher than 90 cents
per gallon. One way to do that is now that oil is $100/bbl again,
setting an import tax on oil to keep a minimum price, somewhere
between $50-$80/bbl, and apply if for natural gas as well to keep
nat gas prices north of $3.5/cu ft.

That will make nukes look cheaper, and solar look cost effective
in some areas, or at least it won't totally kill the US energy
industry every 5 years.

Some other things are still needed of course, convert all trucks
to run on natural gas. Build nukes and clean coal,etc. But anything
we can do to keep money in the US will help build the long term
future.

Coon skin and Muamar hide; makes a pair of jump boots just the right size*

The Gomorgans ask why we don't oblige Muamar Khadafy
and make him a martyr. President Reagan tried in the 80's,
I don't expect anything to be tried now, maybe another speech or two.

Ghettoputer does make the point that Khadafy looks like either
like Jack Nicholson after a rough night, or a sand people from
star wars. I vote sand people.




*from an AFROTC running cadence, or Jodie, I can't remember it exactly
various animals attack, then make a pair of jump boots just the right
size, until the last verse we meet up with Muamar. He was an asshole
murderer in 1987, and he's still an asshole murderer.

New Kindle, old books

Amazon was nice enough to send me a new kindle to replace my dead one.
It's been dead for a while, and I had given it up as a wasted $400.
I finally got around to calling them, and they agreed that the old kindle
was dead and shipped a new one here to Mexico, and are even paying the shipping to return the old one to the USA. Amazing Amazon.

The only disappointment was the shipping email said they were sending a
kindle 2, but a kindle 1 showed up. The whispernet doesn't work outside
the US, with a kindle 1 I still need to connect up to a computer and
drag and drop the files. (What drudgery! he complains; instead of being
stuck in the wilds of mexico with just books in espanol to read...I can
buy any book I want with just a cable)

I'll probably start with "the big short" by Michael Lewis, and a book
by Seth Godin, who's blog is a dally read; he's like the Army, he
generates more ideas before breakfast than most people generate all day.

I did cheat and download a book from project gutenberg, just to have
something immediately, and it's the "Three Musketeers". You can't
beat a book by Alexandre Dumas for quick excitement, but the book has
changed since I read it as a boy, now I see Michael York in every scene,
the memory of the movie has overwritten my memories of the book.

Rainy day, planes trains and apocalypse

Here in Southern Mexico it's been raining continuously for 3 days.
It's cool, not cold, getting down to around 60 F, but it looks
cold and miserable so it feels colder. Reading the interwebs:
Egypt, good luck, congratulations, etc. Hopefully the radicals
won't take over and the worse thing they'll chant outside the US
Embassy will be "Serious knee injury to the Great Satan".

I can see high-speed rail is back on the drawing board. I really
like trains. It's fantastic in Italy,if you live within walking distance
to a train station, you can go from your house to anywhere in Northern
Italy in just 3 hours without a car. It works perfectly in a small
country with nuclear power, everything is all electric, if the price
of oil goes to 400/bbl, train tickets stay the same while airlines
go out of business. (Italy doesn't have nukes unfortunately)

I've taken trains all over europe, the longest run I took was from
Milan to Napoli. 400 miles and 5 hours, which wasn't really that
bad because you're going not to an airport an hour outside of town
and you don't have to be there very early, so a 5 hour trip is 5
hours.

Key things that make trains successful:
- train stations are downtown
- trains are on a separate network then roads, no crossings
- passengers separate network from freight

What makes high speed rail successful:
- high speed trains are on a separate network from other trains
- all distances are within normal airplane travel time, one day travel
is possible if unpleasant
- it's all electric. at some oil price point, high speed rail will
be more efficient if the electricity is coming from coal or nukes.

France is most prepared for the future, with all their major cities
linked by nuclear powered high speed rail, when the next oil shock
kills the airline industry they'll still be ok for internal travel.
I would be ok with emulating france, creating local high speed networks
in the usa with new nukes at the same time to power them.

What I would do if I were emperor, I'd start to build local routes
of less than 400 miles with the nukes to power them and spend money
on research for even faster trains using maglev to build the cross
country routes.

There are two similar length routs (400 mi vs 387 mi) from Milan to
Naples and New Orleans to Dallas, that's about the limit I could be on
a train and still make a meeting on the same day. I found a report
that estimated the building cost for the tracks, two way tracks on
elevated cement roadway, at 20MM euros per km, which is around
$40MM per mile. A 400 mile route would cost $16 Billion.
Or a better route to start with would be the triangle between
houston-dallas-san antonio, that loop would around 720 miles, or
$29 Billion. That triangle route has lots of traffic, lots of people
moving from downtown to downtown.



The purchase of trains versus the purchase of aircraft is a wash. I doubt
we'd save much on fuel costs if you include the cost of a nuclear power
plant to power these things, but we should build them so that we have
availability of travel. We made it through the last crash with some
part of the oil industry left, but I don't see how we can make it through
an infinite number of these crashes. When prices reach $150/bbl again next
year, the economy is going to crash again, then the oil industry. We're
really just starting to ramp up now, after another crash we won't ramp up
at all, prices will just march straight back up again because production will
really be in decline. As the economy circles the drain demand destruction
will kill the price of crude because no one will be traveling.

The reason I think we should be doing this I'm starting to think it's too
late for scrubbing the budget, we're using the credit cards to pay the
mortgage, we should probably build something so that after the crash people
can still travel without having to take a pack-mule.

Irish eyes ain't smilin'

During the peak of the financial crises a couple of years ago,
when it seemed possible that the entire banking system could unravel,
I was in Bucharest for a week. I was having lunch with some Romanians
and they were asking me what was going on in the USA, their pensions
were in AIG. I gave a "I'm sure everything will be fine" that I didn't
believe and felt glad that I had wired some money to Europe the week
before, I thought the dollar was going to continue sliding.

I apparently suck at financial analysis because I had sent the money
at the peak of pessimism at 1.55 eurusd, then sent most of it back at
the peak of european fear last year at 1.25. Doh. (not even doh with
exclamation point, just doh.

Someone who doesn't suck at financial analysis is Michael Lewis from
Vanity Fair. I wanted to buy his book 'the big short' in houston last
year, but I was already burdened down like juan valdez' mule and couldn't
take a hardback book with me. A lot of content from that book is online,
including the story of AIG's trading group as told to Mr Lewis by insiders.

It was good that we didn't let the Romanian's lose their pensions, but
they could have done it without making The Goldman Sachs whole, or providing
a windfall to a guy that was betting against the housing ponzi scheme
instead of screaming about the problem from the rooftops. His story
is told in The Big Short and in a really excellent excerpt we get most
of the story in "Betting on the Blind Side"

That guy Dr Burry is a genius and he deserves to get paid, but very few people
put the whole problem together like he did, and certainly no one in
the government figured it out. (I could see it was a bubble, I knew
that the mortgages were being sold off as bonds from reading 'Liar's
Poker', but I had never heard about CDS' and CDO's before 2008)
Hopefully next time someone sees Armageddon coming down the pike, they
won't just buy CDS's against meteor strikes. ("so if a 100 m tall wave
washes us away, you have to pay $2MM? I'm rich bitches. But don't tell
anyone if they don't buy my newsletter.")

I also like ML's article on the Irish disaster where the government guaranteed a bunch of bankster money, putting the irish people on the hook for a few year's worth of tax revenue instead of just dumping the bondholder's
overboard like the more sensible Icelanders did.

I hope we have a remote off switch for all those tanks

I spent the day watching fox news and playing Napoleon's
campaign in Egypt. I'm making the crossing to Palestine,
and I'd bet the same invasion will be happening soon enough
if the wrong people end up in charge of Egypt.

Egypt deserves to be a republic. A good percentage of the
people in the oilfield are egyptian, and they are some of
the best educated, smartest people, switching from french
to english to arabic at the drop of a hat. Instead, according
to the pols in this article, it's going to be an Islamist
revolution.

But what do Egyptians really think? According to a recent Pew poll, they are extremely radical even in comparison to Jordan or Lebanon. When asked whether they preferred “Islamists” or “modernizers,” the score was 59% to 27% in favor of the Islamists. In addition, 20 percent said they liked al-Qaeda; 30 percent, Hezbollah; 49 percent, Hamas. And this was at a time that their government daily propagandized against these groups.

How about religious views? Egyptian Muslims said the following: 82 percent want adulterers punished with stoning; 77 percent want robbers to be whipped and have their hands amputated; 84 percent favor the death penalty for any Muslim who changes his religion.

If that's the case, I'd bet their first item on their agenda
will be taking all the rage on the streets and pointing it to
Israel. Who knows how that would go if it's M1 tank against M1 tank?

Yikes. That curse of 'may you live in interesting times' is very true,
I wish it was the end of history again