Rural socialism

I live in a very rural area.  It’s about fifteen miles from where I live to where I work, and my preferred route has about ten miles of back roads where I’m more likely to see deer than cars, with the final five miles on a main road.  Where I live is also very red.  I believe 80% of my county voted for Trump in 2020, which was a few points higher than in 2016.  I don’t see as many Trump flags as I used to, but I don’t know if they’ve finally been taken down or were just put away because of winter weather. 

Anyway, a few months ago as I was going to work, I wondered how many people actually live on these back roads.  And it’s hard to say because there are numerous little roads going off into the woods and I don’t know if there’s one house back there or ten.  There are also numerous camps in the area and when you just see glimpses of a building through the trees as you drive by it’s hard to say if that’s a camp or a house.  To make things easy, I’ll just say that there’s 100 people living along those ten miles.  There’s probably about the same on the five miles of main road, but that does bring you in to the business side of town, not the residential side.

Since these are Pennsylvania back roads, they’re … okay.  I’ve driven on worse, I’ve driven on better.  But I was wondering how much it costs to pave these roads.  Now, I started looking online, but it seemed every site I found gave different numbers, from a few hundred thousand dollars to over a million.  The high end were for actually building roads, but even just simply repaving an existing road is expensive, especially since these roads wind around and over hills.  Without finding an actual bill – or driving an expert along the roads so they can calculate how much it would cost – there’s no firm way for me to know how much it would cost to repave these back roads.  For simplicity sake, we’ll take a low end of $100,000.  Oh, that’s per mile.  So for the ten miles of these back roads, that would be $1,000,000.  Of course, maybe we only repave it every decade, so that means the 100 of us who live along these roads need to come up with $100,000 every year, or $1,000 each.

That’s just for these roads I said are my preferred route.  When the weather gets bad, I take another route which is five miles of back roads and ten miles of main road.  I don’t normally take this route because it brings me to the other side of town which I then have to go through.  So that $1,000 a year is just for the decadal repaving of this one ten mile section of road and doesn’t include stuff like plowing in the winter or any other maintenance.

So how do these roads get paved?  Well, the government takes taxes from heavily populated areas and redistributes it so that us rural folk aren’t left with the whole bill.  Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my neighbors used these roads to go to some “Taxation is theft!” rally where they scream that the tyrannical government never did anything for them.

Short story – “No Shame”

“No Shame”

“Hello to all my fans and fellow Truth-seekers.  This is just a superfast update.  I know it’s been a few weeks since I put up a video, and it’s because I’ve been working on something big.  Just as a little preview, according to ‘state astronomers,’ Venus is the closest planet to Earth.  So why do we send all our spaceprobes to Mars?  What about Venus don’t they want us to know?

“Hopefully, I can take care of a few personal things, and get that video of what I’ve discovered up by the end of the week.  So keep an eye out for it and remember, ‘The Truth is hidden, but only if we don’t look.’”

Robin stopped the recording and looked to her boyfriend Sam.  “Do you ever feel guilty?” she asked.

“Of what?”

“You make videos of such ... blatant bullshit just so the gullibly ignorant will check them out and hopefully click on the ads so you can make a few pennies.”

Sam smiled.  “Would it be better if I wrote books of blatant bullshit and sold it for $24.99?”

Robin frowned, but didn’t reply.

“Didn’t someone much wiser than I,” Sam said, “once say ‘a fool and their money are soon parted?’ Of course, I’m not the one taking the money.  I’m taking money from the people trying to sell those gullibly ignorant sops the $24.99 books, and DVDs, and whatever other crap they have.”

“Is that such a distinction?”

Sam stood and put his hands on her shoulders.  “Hey, maybe the stuff I post is such blatant bullshit some of these idiots might figure out they are being played for fools and start looking at things more critically.”

Robin raised an eyebrow.

“At least, one can hope,” Sam added.

***

This began after I watched a video about some moon conspiracy theories back in June 2014.  I wondered if I could come up with some bullshit stories to maybe part some money from conspiracy fools, but didn’t think I’d have the stamina to do it long enough for it to be worth it.  But I could write a short story, which I posted on a site that’s no longer around.  I have no idea why I felt the need to polish it up and repost it.

In case you’re wondering, the reason we send more probes to Mars than Venus is that we can actually land a rover on Mars and have it do science for years instead of melting after half an hour.

Random Story – Playing with mercury

This is just an odd little story from my life.

I was a physics major in college back in the 90’s.  On the physics floor of the science building there was a room which I think was meant to be a study room for majors: there were bookshelves with old science books, a blackboard and a computer hooked up to the internet.  But I think it largely ended up being used as random storage.  In fact, it was where they kept the radiation sources.  These were little plastic disks that held alpha emitters, which would only be dangerous if you ate them.  Alpha particles can be stopped with a sheet of paper, but these were kept in this thing on the countertop built out of lead bricks with a sheet of lead for a roof.  (Side note, those lead bricks made excellent doorstops.)

Anyway, one day I was poking around near the lead bricks and I found a puddle of mercury.  Apparently a thermometer or two had broken.  I told one of the professors, and he put it in a little square, glass jar, maybe half-an-inch on a side and two inches tall.  I don’t know if he didn’t know what else to do with it, but he left the jar in the room. 

I stopped in to use the computer the next day and I found the jar, and I started playing with it.  I quickly found two odd things.  First, when you sloshed the mercury against the glass, there was a metallic ting sound.  Which is not the kind of sound you expect from a liquid.  I mean, if your milk goes “ting,” you have an issue. 

The second odd thing was the weight.  Setting on the counter, the mercury barely covered the bottom of the glass jar.  When you picked it up, you assumed that most of the weight was the glass.  But when you shook it, you could feel the mercury throwing its weight around.  For a brief moment it would be in midair, and then it would slam into the top or bottom of the jar and you could feel it jerk because something heavy had slammed into it. 

I would sit there at the computer shaking this glass jar for minutes just to hear the tings and feel the weight shifting just because it was so weird.