Steve and Judy's Travels!

We, the country, one way or another, just spent 12 billion dollars on an election.  Of that, 10 billion dollars was spent on advertising.  I’d like to focus on the advertising.    Certainly, some media exposure is necessary to communicate candidate qualifications and priorities.  I don’t know how much that is, but we could probably safely assume that the basics didn’t require the entire 10 billion dollars.

Who benefited?  At one level or another, directly or indirectly, that money was contributed by individuals.  Did they get a good return on investment?  Power, access, a winning candidate?  Was there a public good?  A more informed electorate on the candidates and the issues?

Who made money on the transactions?  The people being paid to run the political organizations?  Sure.  The advertising companies producing the advertising?  Yeah.  Political consultants?  Television stations.  It can’t hurt the profitability of a media company to get swamped by advertising revenue every other year.

To continue the thought, are there any other needs in America that might have benefited from that amount of spending?  Healthcare?  Housing?  Child care?  Education?  Job opportunities?  It doesn’t seem to me that the public gets commensurate value for the amount of money spent. I could see why a small segment of the population would like exactly how the process is working right now, though.

While we’re at it, let’s consider an economic question.  Is this a positive thing for the economy?  Even if money is spent that doesn’t produce results, it’s still money spent and pumped into the economy.  If the people that got this money spend it, they buy goods and services that other people produced.  The cash keeps churning, even if the original intent was not met.  Does it matter to the economy whether money is spent well, or is all spending equally positive?  My gut tells me that money spent on, say, investing in a child’s future or improving a neighborhood and opportunities for the people there, or even just building a necessary bridge between cities and people, produces more value than spending that doesn’t produce any lasting results.

It’s election night.

Two years ago, Judy and I were camping with no access to television and went to bed early.  Tonight, we’re glued to the TV.  There is a difference in enthusiasm.

Why go to all the trouble and expense to set up fish farms to harvest salmon?  They build mesh pens out in coastal water, raise the fish in them, source and feed them food pellets, and the waste piles up on the seabed beneath them creating dead zones.

As an alternative, we stood at the entrance to a fish hatchery in Alaska and watched a hundred thousand free-swimming fish crowding the river waiting for their turn to swim up the fish ladder to where they were hatched and raised for the first few weeks of their lives, before they swam out to sea to feed, grow, mature, and swim right back to where they were raised, to present themselves.

Just harvest them!  Are the financial and environmental costs worth it to farm fish in pens and take care of them all their lives while they pollute the water they’re living in, when all you have to do instead is hatch them, turn them loose, let them raise themselves in the open ocean, and return right to where they were released?  Seems like a simpler cleaner way to me. 

I want it to be that simple, but it’s not.

Say you want a hundred thousand adult fish to return.  For that you might have to release ten million hatchlings.  And a hundred thousand fish would not be nearly enough to satisfy the demands of even a single cannery.  The combined canneries in Alaska alone can process a hundred million fish in a season, a combination of hatchery and wild.  Releasing enough hatchery fish at a time to satisfy the demand could overwhelm the carrying capacity of the local estuary.  Even when they go to live and grow in the open ocean, they don’t go to the entire ocean, they congregate at feeding grounds, competing with the wild fish stock and depleting the food source.  Releases from multiple hatcheries from multiple countries could overwhelm the feeding grounds.

A local solution that seems simple, but it’s an illusion.  A bigger picture to consider, and in this case a global one, with tradeoffs.

It took a while, but we got all the parts we needed, all the old sticky attachment points off, and new sticky attachment points on.

To make the magnetic window covers stick to the glass, first it looked like this.

It worked great, the window covers stuck securely, but the look was unsettling.

Now that we’re redone, we have strips of ½ inch magnetic tape all around the windows.  Along the top of each window, we’ve got those sticky metal tabs for the curtain magnets to attach to stuck to the magnetic tape.  With the window covers securely attached at the top, the rest of the magnetic strips provide enough attraction to hold the remainder of each window cover in place.

What it looks like now with the window covers off.

And with the window covers on.

All set now.

In August of 1968, Judy and me driving cross-country in our 1966 VW Bus, having left Southern California searching for a place we’d rather be, we discovered Colorado, a place we had never been before.  And when we stopped at a pullout on top of the hill overlooking Boulder, we were so blown away by what we had found, a little city filled with trees, at the base of the foothills, backdropped by the flatirons, and farther back the continental divide, we immediately declared “We’re home”, before we had even driven down into town to find a place to stay and begin to look for jobs.  Thus began our exploration of the wonders of Colorado.  It was a magical time.

Then, in 1972, four years later, John Denver put to words what we had experienced.  “He was born in the summer of his 27^th year; coming home to a place he’d never been before.”

Now, just thinking back to that time in 1968, and the way it was then.  Well said, John Denver.