Newsletter Week of 9 October 2020
This week I've been focusing on Hunt for the Dymalon Cygnet, the followup to Dance for the Ivory Madonna. I thought folks might enjoy a snippet from this work-in-progress. In this scene from an early chapter, elementary school teacher Rita Cuervo is presiding over a morning Socialization Period.
With national population control limiting each parent to one child, a majority of Rita’s students have no siblings. Socialization Period is a valuable time for kids to interact with one another without so much structured adult supervision.
As children continue arriving, the room grows louder and more crowded, until Rita can no longer concentrate on her work. She lets her attention wander.
Nearby, a group of fifth-graders is discussing what has lately become their favorite subject: the upcoming Confirmation ceremonies.
Dema Baldwin says, “I heard that if you choose Islam, you can have four boyfriends at once.”
Jery Yates shakes his head. “Yeah, but you can’t drink or toke. And you have to pray five times a day. Christians only have to pray on Sunday mornings.”
A boy Rita doesn’t know laughs. “If you pick New Age, you don’t have to pray at all, not unless you want to.”
“Oh, no,” Dema says. “Then you might get reincarnated as a cockroach or a dog or something awful like that. And who wants to keep track of all those crystals?”
“My uncle said that if you pick Catholic, you can have as many kids as you want.”
Dema shakes her head. “That’s only Orthodox Catholics, not Reform. And if you’re Orthodox, you can’t eat meat on Fridays and you have to learn Latin.”
“You could be a Tupacan, but have you heard their music?”
“One thing’s for sure,” another girl says, “I’m not picking the Jedi. They’re just weird.”
Rita turns away to hide her amusement.
- Ripped 7 more DVDs to mp4
- Scanned 17 books
- Wrote 1,000 words on Hunt for the Dymalon Cygnet
- Started learning CSS
- Started work on Rule of Five Quarterly #16
If there's anything cuter than our hamster, Covid, I don't know what it is.
Consider indoor plumbing. If you have indoor plumbing, unless you have your own well and/or septic tank, your water and sewage arrive and depart via municipal infrastructure managed by a department of your local government. Here in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, that's the Depoartmebt of Public Works (DPW).
When the system works, it's something of an engineering miracle. In our town as in most, clean water is pumped into a huge water tower; from there, if flows through a network of pipes to (almost) every house. Since the water tower is higher than any house, the water emerges from the tap under pressure. As long as the tower has water, the system works with no further energy input.
At Meerkat Meade we have a septic tank, but in houses connected to the sewers it works the same way: a simple, well-engineered system driven by gravity.
Who pays for this engineering marvel? Users are billed, generally on the basis of how much water they consume (measured by a meter attached to the water line). In our caounty, there's an added charge for using the sewers—here it's arbitrarily set at twice the charge for incoming water.
These bills pay for the system's maintenance: fixing broken pipes, operating costs for pumps to fill water towers, treatment of incoming water and outgoing sewage, many other things. The cost of adding new buildings to the system is usuallynpaid by the builders (and passed on the the buyer). But who paid for the system to be built in the first place?
In most cases, the initial investment came from a mix of property taxes and municipal bonds (which are paid back from current taxes). So if you're wondering where your taxes go, part of the answer is the simple, miraculous system that brings you water and takes away your waste. The next time a libertarian tells you that taxes are theft, ask them where they get their water.