[theluckycountry]

Amazing amount of work newfie, imagine doing it by barrow lol. Breaking the rock by hand! That's the old way hey. No unemployment back then. Is that a steel mesh laid over the bridge?

When I had the property the track in got pretty eroded over the years and before sale I decided to have it leveled out, that and have some huge piles of crap buried. The guy that came was a farmer doing some cashies on the side, had a brand new bobcat on a brand new tilt tray, a small tracked unit but very efficient. Four hours later he'd done all the roadwork and dug a big 2m deep trench, tossed in all the garbage and covered it over. He asked for like $350. I gave him $400 and thanked him profusely.

As I often do I pondered the time and effort it would have taken to do that without oil. I sometimes ride off for hours through the mountains to some scenic waterfall or lookout, and sometimes ponder the same thing. Amazing roads carved through mountains and the machine I ride on, and all for personal pleasure and convenience mostly. I know the history of those roads, some were carved out by gangs of convicts. Some by pioneering families over decades.

[Newfie]

As a temporary measure I placed a 12” culvert, 16’ long, about 24” below grade to bottom of trench. Took me 2 days to do and 2 weeks to recover.

[Plantagenet]

Good work on that bridge, Newfie.

The big problem with roads up here in Alaska is melting permafrost. With global warming things are getting bad fast.

There are big, large, and even huge bodies of ice in the ground underlying central and northern Alaska, and these are starting to melt. The highway departments have to go out every few years and fill in the dips with more concrete. Sometimes they get tired of that and they go out and dig enormous holes to remove all the ice......during one recent job near the university they dug up over 30 feet of asphalt that had been used to fill in sags that formed year after year due to the melting ground ice.


Permafrost sags in road near Wrangell National Park, Alaska

Even worse, some houses and cabins have ice bodies under them that are melting ----- for instance my lake cabin and its little house. Every few years we have to go re-level the cabin and the boat house. I skipped releveling the boat house for a a few years because I was man-hauling gravel down a slope to fill a different giant hole that was forming on my route down to the lakeshore , and by the time I got back to the boathouse it had sunk about a foot into wet, mucky dirt. I had to hire people to dig the boathouse of the muck and get it back up on blocks.......which themselves are now sinking into the muck.

Sheesh!

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'A')s a temporary measure I placed a 12” culvert, 16’ long, about 24” below grade to bottom of trench. Took me 2 days to do and 2 weeks to recover.

[yellowcanoe]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('theluckycountry', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'A')s a temporary measure I placed a 12” culvert, 16’ long, about 24” below grade to bottom of trench. Took me 2 days to do and 2 weeks to recover.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yellowcanoe', ' ')It's a bit funny that we are in the process of trying to build a cottage at an age where many cottage owners are thinking their time as a cottage owner will be coming to an end as they are no longer able to maintain it.

[theluckycountry]

You guys have it lucky up there, there isn't that much free lakeside land in Oz and what is, typically is farmland. There is a dam near me with it's artificial lake, it has some cabins for sale but like many rural dams the water level varies greatly. 2/3 of the land around it is grazing land, nearly all the rest state forest and just a little clutch of cabins that are expensive. Over the border in the 'lakes' region it's again expensive with the non agricultural areas more or less house blocks where people live all year round. It's a dry country. If you've got a half a million spare you could by a tract of farmland adjacent to a river I suppose but you'd have to do more than just bum around there 3 months of the year, rates and land tax would make it an expensive holiday.

I just discovered an alarming trend too, council rates for serviced rural areas are going up higher than for city blocks. The rates, to pay for water, sewage, bins and roadworks etc are based on land values, or they used to be? Now they have another formula that seems to be based on cost of maintaining infrastructure divided by the population lol. In some towns the rates have doubled in 2 years! So have insurance premiums for houses, and that along with the food inflation is really putting the squeeze on many old age pensioners who have no reserves. It's not too bad where I am but our rates are higher than comparable city rates. I view it as a premium for the great lifestyle out here but many who grew up here and didn't have the opportunities of a city income are now struggling. A lot of older cars on the roads.

Mind you the towns where the rates are going astronomical are over the border in NSW, that state is the premier state, like California, a financial basket case.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')enterfield Shire Council is $5 million in deficit, with a low base of ratepayers and, among other expenses, 146 bridges and a 1,700km road network to maintain.

[ralfy]

It's like that point about economic order quantities, etc., where each town has only a few days' worth of supplies because of the high cost of transporting urban middle class conveniences to the countryside.

[yellowcanoe]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '
')Hopefully you lived life as fully as possible before you got old, and now having a waterfront cabin will be a little bit of joy for you as you get even older.

[Newfie]

At about 55 I managed to finagle a way to get 8 weeks vacation a year, 3 weeks paid and 5 unpaid. I just decided to live sufficiently frugal that we could afford it. Later I changed jobs and there I was part time with full time benefits. We worked it out so that for our last 2 year's we worked one week and took a week off. One week in the city, then bolt for the boat.

Now 73 I still work pretty hard. When I lay up too much then I get run down physically and emotionally. When we got back to the boat this year I felt lousy, how wouldnI keep going? After a week on the boat I was all right again. It felt like it took 10 years off my age.

I am still doing my own aloft mast work which is pretty good. Of course I can tell my decline, sadly. But why hasten it?

For me living in cities is deadly to my soul and my body.

[Plantagenet]

Like YellowCanoe in Canada I was also lucky enough to obtain a university position here in Alaska.....this meant 3 months "off" in the summer and another month off at winter break.

I never got much summer vacation because my scientific research program was quite successful, and I mostly wound up spending big hunks of my summers flying into remote localities all over Alaska and doing field work using helicopters, float planes, kayaks, zodiacs, 4 wheelers etc. to access field localities on volcanoes, glaciers, active faults, and other cool stuff all over Alaska. Eventually I was elected as an officer in two different national and international scientific organizations, and then I began to travel during the academic year to attend numerous organisational meetings in Washington DC, Zurich, Beijing, and other cities, and I also participated in international scientific conferences so I travelled around the world to those as well during the school year. And I also did foreign scientific work with various collaborators in Europe and China, and did more fieldwork there in cool places like Tibet. I was very busy with university teaching and writing scientific papers and participating in multiple projects with fieldwork and travel and all that pretty much filled up both the summers and the main part of the academic year.


How I spent my summers in Alaska......

And then there were sabbaticals---year long opportunities to leave the university and travel and live and work with colleagues overseas.

Of course I also took some personal vacations, but these were almost always over winter break. Each winter I travelled all over the US and Mexico and then I started going to Europe each winter break. It turned out that travelling "off season" on trips through Europe is really great. The locals would all be complaining about how cold Spain or France or Greece was, but the hotels were cheap and having just arrived from Alaska the winter weather in Europe always seemed really really nice to me.

You'd think that being away from the university so much of the time to do field work and attend scientific meetings would be frowned upon, but it's quite the opposite. The more I did overseas field work and foreign travel for my science projects, the more scientific papers I wrote, and the more service work I did an officer of the two scientific organisations, the more important my university thought I was, and the more freedom they would give me to do even more foreign travel and work and science.

It was the good life for sure. I had so much fun I can still hardly believe it. And the best thing of all is that I don't feel an iota of guilt because of all the benefits to humanity that came from my teaching, service and research---at least that what my university said at the nice little ceremony where they gave me various honors when I retired.

Cheers!

[Newfie]

Good on you Plant. Sounds like a great life.

How is retirement treating you?

[mousepad]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '
')Of course I also took some personal vacations,

[theluckycountry]

Increasing Psychopathic Behavior Is A Sign That Society Is On The Verge Of Breaking Down

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')iscussions on collapse often turn to signs and signals - The economy, politics and social tensions have become increasingly unstable for many years now, and much like adding more and more weight to a man standing on a frozen lake, eventually the ice is going to break. The question is, how do we know when that moment will be?

As cultural systems begins to dissolve due to political clashes and economic decline the real evil tends to slither out of the woodwork. It happens slowly at first, then all at once. A sure sign of accelerating collapse is the growing prevalence of psychopaths and psychopathic behavior in the open.

The US appears to have entered the middle stages of such a collapse with many sociopaths and psychopaths beginning to feel that they might be able to act out their worst impulses without consequences. They are beginning to test the waters to see what they can get away with.

In the past ten years there has been a dramatic uptick in mass violence and theft. With the advent of social media it is now easier than ever for spontaneously planned riots to form with little warning, and in most cases these mobs are random in who and what they attack. They might organize in the name of politics or activism, but they tend to lash out at whatever targets are closest or easiest rather than the people they blame for their travails.

In most cases these events result in simple property destruction in urban areas, but more and more there has been an underlying and aggressive impulse to hurt people. There will come a time very soon when the the goal is not just to steal or vandalize, but to use instability as a smokescreen; a distraction the provides opportunities to harm others.

[mousepad]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('theluckycountry', '&')quot; That's a far cry from other religious teachings that advocate cutting off hands and the denigration of women etc.

[Newfie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('richardd12', 'T')he Death of Cities provokes contemplation on urban dynamics. Thoughts may navigate through concerns about urban decay, shifts to remote work, or hopes for revitalization. It's a reflection on the evolving nature of cities, sparking discussions on their future, resilience, and the impact of societal changes.

[noobtube]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('theluckycountry', '[')b]Increasing Psychopathic Behavior Is A Sign That Society Is On The Verge Of Breaking Down

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'h')ttps://www.zerohedge.com/political/increasing-psychopathic-behavior-sign-society-verge-breaking-down

[yellowcanoe]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'L')ike YellowCanoe in Canada I was also lucky enough to obtain a university position here in Alaska.....this meant 3 months "off" in the summer and another month off at winter break.

I never got much summer vacation because my scientific research program was quite successful, and I mostly wound up spending big hunks of my summers flying into remote localities all over Alaska and doing field work using helicopters, float planes, kayaks, zodiacs, 4 wheelers etc. to access field localities on volcanoes, glaciers, active faults, and other cool stuff all over Alaska. Eventually I was elected as an officer in two different national and international scientific organizations, and then I began to travel during the academic year to attend numerous organisational meetings in Washington DC, Zurich, Beijing, and other cities, and I also participated in international scientific conferences so I travelled around the world to those as well during the school year. And I also did foreign scientific work with various collaborators in Europe and China, and did more fieldwork there in cool places like Tibet. I was very busy with university teaching and writing scientific papers and participating in multiple projects with fieldwork and travel and all that pretty much filled up both the summers and the main part of the academic year.

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yellowcanoe', '
')
I'm an IT specialist, not an academic.

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('noobtube', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('theluckycountry', '[')b]Increasing Psychopathic Behavior Is A Sign That Society Is On The Verge Of Breaking Down