Downsizing to a dorm room

As often happens, Mrs ERJ and Belladonna nailed the problems presented by the downsize.

Bella went from single occupancy of a 100 square-foot bedroom and a 24 square-foot closet to half of a 100 square foot bedroom while still keeping her 24 square-foot closet and she did it with grace and aplomb.

Her roommate brought three times as much "stuff" and it was a struggle.

Most of the roommate's stuff is still in tubs stacked at the end of her bed.  There is just no room to put it.

One of the roommate's solutions, "Bella, you don't mind if I just spill over..." never got legs.  Things are so snug that "spilling over" meant that doors and drawers would not open.

I think Bella's roommate's parents knew it would not fit.  I suspect they knew better than to fight over every single item she felt was essential.  Bella's roommate will figure it out quickly enough.  The items that she "knew" were necessities will be ballast dumped from the gondola of the hot-air balloon soon enough.

College is not a fashion show.

Mostly, I stayed within earshot but kept my mouth shut.  I let Mrs ERJ deal with all that dainty stuff.  I was there for the heavy lifting and moral support.

Nattering about the absolute necessity of having fifty-six shades of purple lipstick and matching nail polish depletes the oxygen from the air.  I cannot breathe. 

I think Bella may have packed three colors of nail polish: clear, pink and blaze orange (for hunting season) and SPF chapstick for lip treatment.  Bella had plenty of room to stow her cosmetic load-out.

I do not intend to disparage Bella's roommate.  She is a very sweet young lady.  It is just that she came from a more aesthetically refined and resource rich environment than Bella.  For Bella's roommate, dorm life is vastly more impersonal and industrial than what she is used to.

Dorm life will be a big change for Bella, but I don't think it will be quite as jarring.  For one thing, fourteen other Class of 2015 graduates from Eaton Rapid went to Grand Valley.  Bella's roommate might be the only one from her out-of-state high school there.  For another thing, the step down and the loss of privacy were not as severe for Bella.  Finally, I know Bella to be incredibly resilient, a fact I do not commend her for frequently enough.

I think both young ladies are in for an education.  Bella might find herself inheriting some shades of nail polish that she has only seen in magazines.

Light blogging over the next few days

According to Bella, this is packing light.  The other three girls are all bringing two vehicle loads.  Wrenches included to assemble lofts (if necessary).  Cordless drill to assemble furniture, if necessary.

My blogging will be light over the next few days.  We will be delivering Belladonna to the tender mercies of Grand Valley State University.  It is a bit of a surprise to me, but Bella has three apartment mates and she is the one who lives closest to home.  Two of the four will have vehicles so I anticipate they will be making some runs to the store as they discover items that they forgot to pack.

One of the things GVSU did well was to put their campus in the middle of nowhere.  NOBODY will be walking off campus to a package liquor store or a bar.  The distances are daunting.  Yeah, I know that many college students drink.  But it does not need to be easy nor does it need to seem as though it is encouraged.

Roger

Today I helped Roger by cutting up dead trees to make it easier for him to maintain his place.

People can really piss me off.  While Roger (and his wife) were recovering from multiple surgeries in an assisted living facility, somebody stole his chainsaws, his leaf blowers...even the power meter off the side of his house.

Working for Roger is pretty light duty.  I think he enjoys a chance to jawbone with somebody about fruit growing even more than the help he gets tidying up the place.  I had plenty of chances to catch my breath as Roger passed on hard-won information.  Some of the information involves taste testing the kaleidoscope of apples as they become ripe.  Every year they seem to come in a slightly different order.  This year the McIntosh types seem be be early.

Roger's favorite McIntosh is UltraMac.  I found that it was very sensitive to scab when I tried to grow it.  Note to reader:  I don't spray.  But I may have to give it another look.  They are delicious.

Public Pensions and the "soft" stock market

All images snipped from the Wilshire Report referenced below.

According to the Wilshire report, the public pension "industry" is about 72% funded.  One response to under-funding is to change the asset allocation into investments with more "pop" in the hope of catching up. 

Over the last ten years the percentage in "equities" has been constant but the mix shifted.  US equities decreased by 17% while Non-US equities grew by 7%, Private equity grew by 7% and Real Estate holdings grew by the balance.

There is no free lunch.  Changes that increase the upside nearly always increase the fund's downside potential.

Looking at two pensions that have been in the news:

CalPers has approximately $300B in assets and is funded at 77% of obligations.  About 63% of that is in equities and another 10% is in real estate.

Illinois State Pension is $138B in assets and is funded at about 43% of obligations.  The Illinois system is strange...it is a bit like the segments of an orange.  Rather than do a bunch of non-value added math to add them together I will just report on one of them, the Teachers Pensions.  They have about 52% of their assets invested in equities and 13% invested in real estate.

What next?

The mode for the Percent Funded is the 60%-to-70% funded bucket.  Fully one quarter of all funds examined fell into this bucket.

Regression of Funding Ratio and Equity Allocation

Those funds, on average, have 70% of their assets in equity type investments.

The rules of estimating funding and future return are a bit arcane.  They are allowed to average many year's performance to smooth things out.  But in my simple, back-of-envelop way of thinking, 70% exposure * 70% funding means that a 10% drop in the S&P500 (a broad based index of equities) means that their funding ratio dropped about five percent.

That may be one of the biggest reasons the Fed has been juicing up the economy in general and the Stock Markets in general.  It was seen as the only way to avoid Pension Armageddon. 

It does not look like they will be successful.

Embodied Energy and Recycling

I admit to being ambivalent about recycling.  I understand the benefits of recycling in areas where there is high population density.  Pulling recycled material out of the waste stream reduces tipping costs.  That can be done economically because the amount of incremental travel required to collect the material is small when compared  to those of us who live in the hinterboonies. 

For example, we had been taking our recyclables to Charlotte.   The recycling time window is short.  Consequently, we usually made a dedicated (i.e., single purpose) trip.  The round trip distance is 20 miles.

The "embodied energy" cost of driving a typical American vehicle is very close to 10MJ/mile*.  Two-thirds of that is in fuel costs and one-third is in the depreciation of the "embodied energy" represented by the vehicle itself.

So the embodied energy cost of driving twenty miles is 200MJ.

Wikipedia lists polystyrene as having an embodied energy of 88MJ/kg**.  Beverage bottles are usually made of PET (a form of polyester) but I do not have data for PET, so I will used the value for polystyrene for future calculations.

A typical Gatorade bottle weighs 1.4 ounces.  That calculates out as 3.5MJ/bottle (some sources quote up to 5.4MJ/bottle).  Translated into miles, that is about 2.7 Gatorade bottles per mile.  A round trip of twenty miles cannot be justified for anything less than 55 Gatorade bottles.  In our strange, upside-down world, it is notable that the 130 Calories of Gatorade in the bottle delivers 0.55MJ to the customer, or approximately 15% of the embodied energy represented by the bottle.

A typical water bottle weighs 0.8 ounces.  Consequently it takes about 100 empty bottles to be "embodied energy" neutral for a twenty mile round trip.

Paper, cardboard and boxboard:  Forget about it.  It has an embodied energy of about 10MJ/kg.  Reprocessing incurs a substantial penalty because it involves wet processing and drying.  Drying is extremely energy intensive.  Recycling calculations should comprehend net energy savings but that is not information that is readily found***.

Incidentally, some people recycle based on concern about carbon footprint.  Embodied energy is roughly related to carbon emissions.  More energy nearly always entails more CO2 emission.  Recycling is not always favorable to carbon emissions.

Details:
*Extrapolated from Australian data to comprehend a 4000 pound curb weight vehicle like a base Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the United States.  100,000 mile average lifespan.  Yeah, I know they can last longer but a bunch of them get knocked off the road due to accidents well before that distance.

**By comparison, gasoline has an embodied energy of approximately 48KJ/kg, so "engineering plastics" have about twice the embodied energy as their base feedstocks.  I have some feelers out on this, so these numbers may change.

***Recycling PET beverage containers incurs an energy penalty of approximately 30MJ/kg so recycling really only nets about 60MJ/kg.  Other sources quote an energy penalty of up to 65MJ/kg which leaves an energy net of 23MJ/kg.  These calculations made no attempt to comprehend "net energy".  No penalties were assessed against the recycled stream and no residual value was assigned to the depreciated vehicle.

****The marketing cachet of products with a high percentage of recycled content has driven the cost of recycled materials above that of virgin materials for several types of plastic resin.

*****A major cost in recycling is in sorting the stream into individual types of plastic.  One solution would be to include a specific fluorescent dyes into each material such that they glow a different color in UV light.  Then, DVT technology could be used to sort the product.  Imagine a conveyor belt, UV lights, air jets and video cameras or photo sensors with color filters over them so they could only "see" certain colors.  The air jet(s) could be programmed to turn on when a bright spot went over them. This technology has been proposed for PFEMA based inspections for robotic applied products where there is not enough natural color contrast to use DVT with natural light.

Everything I need, and nothing that I don't

I was reading through my usual morning fare when I ran into this sentence at Marginal Revolution:

The food scene today offers a seemingly never-ending supply of scarce experiences, ingredients, and dishes.

The simultaneously use the adjectives "never-ending supply" and "scarce" to describe the same nouns struck me as odd.  How can that be?

Implicit within the sentence is the understanding that "the market"  segmented into a near-infinite number of infinitesimally small splinters.  It is a case of  (∞*0).

That might help explain the mysterious forces that are keeping the economy inflated.  Valuation-per-unit is based on the illusion of scarcity.  Total valuation is based on per-unit-price times total-number-units.

The challenge of marketing is to convince the sucker consumer that there is no substitutability between offerings.  That is, an "Apple" guy could never use an Android, nor is it possible to eat Chinese when your heart is set on Thai.

As individuals, we can muddle through this if we keep a few things in mind. 

• The concept of "enough", as in, I have enough calories to make it through the day or, I have enough firearms or a big enough of a home.  Listen to the song on the video (you knew I included it for a reason, right?)
• Skill rules.  It is better to be a proficient cook than to have a spice cabinet with 230 small bottles in it.  It is better to be highly proficient with one shotgun (even a single shot!) than to have 70 different firearms, none of which you can operate in the dark.
• It is highly likely that we will come through this in fine shape if we keep our wits about us, treat each other as gently as possible and don't do anything stupid.
• We are all going to die.  Someday.  Make your peace with your maker.

The food scene today offers a seemingly never-ending supply of scarce experiences, ingredients, and dishes. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.WAz9lkxX.dpuf

The food scene today offers a seemingly never-ending supply of scarce experiences, ingredients, and dishes. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.WAz9lkxX.dpuf

GSD kinds of guys

Early in our courtship, Pre-Mrs ERJ told me that one of the things she liked about me was that I was a GSD kind of guy.  No, not German Shepherd Dogs kind of guy.  Getting "Stuff" Done kind of guy.  Her previous beau talked a great story, bought all the books, could expound for hours at parties, but never got around to putting a hammer-to-nail.

Well, we now have German Shepherds.  Mrs ERJ held out a long time.  The picture in her head was that there is no reason to have a dog that weighs more than 40 pounds.  She held firm until Belladonna melted her with charm.  Now we have two of them.

For a long time, the dog run that was designed and build for the 25lb-to-40lb dogs worked.  It is about 16' by 32' and the perimeter fence is 48 inches high.  It worked...until it did not.

And that was this week.

Zeus started jumping out at will.

He had been scaring the delivery people.   They could see that he could leave any time he wished.  We started having to pick up the large USPS parcels that would not fit into the mail box at the post office

What sealed the deal is that we have been alternating which dog we take on our daily three mile walk.  And, this week, Zeus decided that he did not want to wait his turn.

Mrs ERJ authorized me to do something to improve the perimeter fence on Stalag 13.

Roll of welded wire is very artsy looking.  I opted for 2" by 4" welded wire fencing.  It is easy to work with.  It might not be stout enough to stand a ground-level assault by the dogs but it should be plenty to tip the dogs back, over into the kennel.

Side post.  8 foot long, treated 2X4s.  Two "U" bolts attaching it to the existing fence posts.  Hercules is the older German Shepherd and he is watching the proceedings with great interest.

Corner post.  It took  a little bit of chainsaw whittling to get them to snug down.

Another failure mode is Zeus jumping up and opening the latch.  That was fixed with a carabiner.  Long experience taught me the value of tethering the carabiner so we don't lose it.

Zeus is a young dog and a little bit ADHD.  Surely he can jump out over the gate but he would have to give up the delight of barking and jumping at the person coming up the drive (right side of picture).  Seven feet sure looks much taller than four feet!  Is it a fashion faux pas to have dog fencing that mixes diamonds and plaids?

The sharp observer will notice some black "sewer pipe" at the bottom of the post on the right side of the gate.  That sewer pipe was a fix to prevent the Boston Terrier from squeezing through the gap at the bottom.

Day trip to Lake Michigan

Duck Lake at top of photo.  Lake Michigan bottom right corner.  Sand dunes in lower left corner.  Image from HERE

Belladonna wanted to make a "retro" trip to Lake Michigan.  She wanted to make one last family trip before she heads off to Grand Valley State University.

There are many, many beaches along Lake Michigan.  Our beach, the ERJ family beach, is Duck Lake State Park.

Base camp

View to the west.  Blue skies, very light haze.  Winds out of the southwest blew the warm surface water to our beach.

View looking North.  More seagulls than people.  This is not a beach in Rio de Janeiro

View looking East.  This is the outlet of Duck Lake and it is always much warmer than Lake Michigan.  The youngest kids swim on the East side of the bridge where it is less windy and the water is even warmer.

Looking South from our base camp.

Bella inflating a beach toy

Bella reading a "beach book".  So far, she is enjoying this author.

Somebody else looks pretty satisfied.  I wonder why?

Oh!  It is probably because these young athletes are setting up camp right in front of us.

Kubota studied the aerodynamics of low speed flight.  Tossing a few potato chips up in the air is always good entertainment at the beach.

My lovely bride.

Yeah, we did a little swimming.

The young lady standing on the surf board paddled from out-of-sight from the north to out-of-sight to the south.  Kubota's head in lower right side of picture.

One kid flying a kite and three grown-ups talking about how much better it was when they were kids.

Do you remember when you thought you had to lean forward to run really, really fast?  Dried seaweed on beach uprooted by 9 foot waves yesterday.  It was much calmer today.

Another little tyke.  I have a feeling that "Mom" has used the grab handle on the back of this PFD more than once.

I think Bella wanted to remember when happiness was as easy to find as a new Tinkerbell swim suit.

We had a great time.  Hat tip to the staff at Duck Lake State Park (just south of Whitehall, Michigan).    We changed into our beach clothes at the picnic pavilion a quarter mile east of the beach.  The facilities were squeaky clean.