$100 on The Great Humongous

Except this time, the stone bounced off Goliath’s forehead and he shot back with a sniper rifle and wiped out David and his entire family, and his dog, and his cat, and his entire neighbourhood all the way to the coast.

Did the Canadian Weston family start selling bread in Syria?

I don’t think we need a headline or a news story to know this … nothing he says means anything. The next four years is just going to be a never ending parade of bad faith, anger and anxiety.

“We are made of starstuff” – Carl Sagan

It’s inspiration to me because it always reminds me of our insignificantly small and momentary place in this universe.

Majority of Brexit voters are a bunch of drunken lunatics that can be corralled like a herd of cows.

The list I thought of is a list of the most common things I use in any kit for just a homeowner doing things around the house.

If the person isn’t interested in doing things around the house any more than they have to … then the kit is enough to do the most basic things.

If the person is interested in doing things around the house … then the toolbox can be filled with more and more things.

I like building/repairing/renovating/tinkering/mechanics and anything like that and after 30 years I have a ton of stuff and the main kit I carry around in my truck basically would allow me to do just about anything. Not a professional but capable enough to do about 80 to 90 percent of most things that is in, on, around, over or under a house.

I think that can come after because for some people, a powered drill is a bit of an expense they can’t afford. I had to go without a good powered drill of my own for about a year after I got my first home. I borrowed a lot of things back then. I did have a drill but it was a 1950s black and decker wired one that was on its last legs. It took me about two / three years before I got my first brand new drill and it was wired because it was cheap. Wired drills are cheaper, last longer - they are less convenient but at least they get the job done. Then it took me about five years later before I got a good cordless one for about $200. Then it took me about ten years later when I got a lithium battery powered Dewalt impact driver and drill set and its all I ever use now.

You can start off with a cheap battery powered drill but honestly, I’d just wait until you can afford a $200-$300 impact/drill set (they usually go on sale at some point) and that set will last you years or decades of use. If you buy a cheap one (like I did), the battery will die prematurely in a year and you’ll end up buying another one … do this three or four times over four years and the cost would have been saved if you had just bought one good powered drill to begin with.

Ask me how I know because the first powered drills I bought were cheap $100 specials - they were good but the batteries never last … even just sitting eventually just drains the batteries and slowly kills them.

It was good advice about 20 years ago … hell, I remember furnishing my first home with a used mattress back then. I remember I had to daily take it out and place in the sun and wind for a week every day, flipping it every few hours … to get rid of the horrible cigarette smell from someone who was a chain smoker!

It’s not a good idea any more because of the danger of bed bugs.

I would rather sleep on the floor or keep your present arrangement than take the risk of buying a used mattress.

The biggest risk of a used mattress is in carrying bed bugs which is everywhere now, more so in the past decade because they outlawed toxic insecticides that kept them in control in the past. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing they no longer allow DDT but it meant a resurgence of bed bugs.

Bed bugs are not to be taken lightly as it will cost you a lot of money time and agony if you ever get infested with them. You basically have to shut your life down for about a month to get rid of them and even then there’s still a chance you won’t get rid of them.

Mmmmm … spackle … delicious spackle

Get a small tool box and start collecting tools inside it.

Basics to start with are:

• hammer
• screwdrivers (get the three major ones - flat, Philips (cross) and Robertson (square))
• screwdriver with multiple replaceable heads (get one with as many heads as you can)
• pliers (buy a set of at least three types) (also make sure at least one of these has a wire cutter)
• vice grips
• Allen key set (metric and imperial)
• adjustable wrench
• exacto knife (with replaceable blade)
• crow bar (at least 12" long but bigger is better) (don’t get smaller because you can use the flat screwdriver for anything smaller … a good size piece of iron is good for lots of uses)

To me this would be a good start. This is basically what I started with about 30 years ago and now I have a garage full of tools to literally build a house.

Every time you have something to fix or repair, use your kit and make sure to put everything back. And often you may need a special tool to get your job done, if you can afford it buy it and add it to your kit. The cost of the new tool will repay itself as you use it again later.

And if you are not mechanically inclined than don’t feel a need to grow the kit either. These basics will help with most situations.

This is where the debate constantly diverges to extremes … either have sensible long lasting tires … or high performance racing tires … but nothing moderate in between.

Manufacturers are more than able to produce a reasonable motorcycle tire that would have enough performance and would last far longer. There just isn’t any incentive to do it. It makes them far more money to make tires that don’t last as long and at this point, I think everyone knows that, we are just not able to do anything about it.

Like my 1998 BMW … it’s an ancient machine at this point and it was originally a performance bike when it was new and would have benefited from a high performance tire … but its 26 years old and I really don’t trust it to go fast any more but I love the look of the bike and I enjoy riding it. I maintain and service it myself but there are far too many old parts on it that there will inevitably something that will fail and I really don’t want that to happen at speed. All I need is a good decent tire, not a tire that is meant for the race track for a modern newer bike.

A bit of gasoline on a raging dumpster fire

The whole traction debate only makes sense if you start getting into racing speeds and riding on a fast race track. For the average rider, we’re only riding at normal highway speed (at least we are supposed to) and guys like me like our riding lifestyle enough to never get into crazy speeds because we baby our bikes, we don’t want to create any more variables to put our lives at risk and we’re cheap and don’t want to wear out our tires.

If I knew of a manufacturer that produced a cheap $100 tire that could last four or five season of my light moderate riding … it would be the only tire I would buy. But there are so many manufacturers, types, subtypes, models, years, design, material of tires out there that’s it’s a constant science to try to figure out what is real and what isn’t. I usually don’t have the time to research it all nor do I have the resources that I just end up buying the same Metzeler tires because I don’t want to order the wrong tire and I definitely don’t want to install the wrong tire either.

The contact area compared to the weight ratio is not that different from any other vehicle … a bike weighs less so it has less contact … a car weighs more and so needs more contact with the road … a truck weighs a lot and needs even more contact with the road.

The end result is always the same … the technology is there to make a motorcycle tire last far longer and the same with car tires … the problem is is that there is no financial incentive to make a long lasting tire that would be better for the environment.

I ride motorcycles and tires have always been a major issue with riders because of cost. Bike tires wear out fast even though it’s a lighter vehicle and tends to put on less mileage.

The main culprit that most industry insiders have suggested is that motorcycle tires are purposely designed to not last as long because its so easy to market crappy tires to the vast majority of riders. All you need is have marketing campaign of racers and racing tires and then stamp the name on a tire and sell it to young guys who want to ride as fast as possible … they’ll pay hundreds year after year for tires that only last one season but supposedly give them great performance.

I ride moderately on a 1998 BMW K1200, a fast sport touring bike and I put on moderate mileage every summer … I’m not a long distance rider … yet I have to change my tires just about every year.

Fortnine, a Youtube channel dedicated to motorcycle riding did a great description of this …

https://youtu.be/hEZeR9E3JyY

The giveaway is that you could put a small car tire on a motorcycle and it would last ten times longer … whereas you place a motorcycle tire on a motorcycle tire and it will last for a far shorter time.

Motorcycle tires are designed to not last as long … fast riders can argue that better tires do not last as long and I agree with them … but for moderate riders or just Sunday riders with low mileage, there is no need to have motorcycle tires last for such a short period of time. It’s all meant to sell as many tires as possible for no reason other than to make someone money.

I wondered about that too when I first saw it a year or so ago.

But apparently it’s an anonymous internet comment.

https://medium.com/incendiary/poverty-exists-because-the-rich-cannot-be-satisfied-c65a6119ab69

Human greed is the common point of failure in any of societal systems. In any system … capitalism, socialism, religious, commune, authoritarian … the common thing that holds it together is concentration of power. The problem that it suffers from is … concentration of power.

No matter what group you create, power eventually gets concentrated to smaller groups of people and it only attracts a certain group of individuals who only understand the need to want power and control over everyone and everything to the detriment of everything else.

Once we find a way to build a societal system that is able to distribute power and keep any one or group of people from dominating everyone else, then we might have a chance of developing a sustainable civilization. In the meantime, no matter what you want to call it or do with it, if the end process just concentrates power to a small group of fallible ignorant humans, nothing will ever work.