Critical Mass Video Rant

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Here are some thought on the subject of population density and what happens when it reaches a certain critical mass….

You move to a rural area; it’s great. Almost never anyone else on the road – especially in the early morning or late at night. It’s wonderful.

Then you begin to encounter other cars at those times of the day – and night. You find it’s harder to pass/avoid them and even if you do, there’s another up ahead.

It won’t be too much longer before they are there all the time – and everywhere. Traffic appears. Your pleasant 35 mile drive into town becomes a conga line – with a Clover at the lead. You can’t pass, because there are Clovers coming at you in the opposite lane, too.

And cops.

My rural county used to have just a handful of sheriff’s deputies – and they drove beat-up old Crown Vics without radar guns.

Well, Hut! Hut! Hut!

They now drive new Ford Explorer “Interceptors” with all the latest tacticool gear our tax dollars can buy – plus radar guns.

It’s dismal.

The one upside is that when this happens – when the Clovers invade and turn what was a really nice quiet, out-of-the-way place into another clone of Aspen or Northern Virginia – real estate values go sky high. If you own land, especially, you can milk one of these carpetbagging despoilers for an enormous sum and use it to flee to an even more remote area!

. . .

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15 COMMENTS

  1. Lucky you, sounds like Virginia is “getting” half of the Amazon 2 HQ. Taxpayers are going to get royally hosed on that one. Sounds like 3 billion plus……. Why can’t they pay their own way?

    • Because this is the new way of things. There are two classes. Those who negotiate what they pay in taxes and those who don’t. As well as those who pay taxes and those who receive taxes.

      Or in simple terms the godfather decides who will do business in his territory and who won’t and set the tribute individually.

  2. Too many people does lead to the erosion of liberty. The quality of life certainly drops. My once picturesque rural community is now just another American suburb.

    I absolutely despise the cookie-cutter housing, cookie-cutter shopping malls, and the corporate food joints that have become commonplace in America. There is nothing quality or individualistic about any of those things. They are a product of the evil corporate state. I can remember when almost everything was either locally or regionally owned. No Wal-Marts. No Dollar Generals. No Macy’s.

    Zoning laws, taxes, and regulations have done their job in destroying small businesses. My community store sold fuel until a state law forced them to replace their old pumps. Of course, the new pumps weren’t affordable. That was their only way of competing against Dollar General. It’s a been a ghost town ever since.

  3. Nice rant. It’s not that population increases, it’s that somewhere along the way there’s an inflection point where people start moving in because of momentum instead of lifestyle. When I moved out west Denver was much larger than I remembered in the late 1980s. Red Rocks amphitheater was out “in the middle of nowhere,” not a short drive from what was to become C-470, which had been under construction when I was in school. The whole west end of the metro area was all brand new. But for the most part the people moving to Colorado seemed to want to enjoy the Colorado lifestyle.

    These days I think the driver for moving to Colorado is to get a job. Maybe secondary reason might be because you want to escape California, but from what I can see from the political changes there are lots of Cali expats who bemoan the “lack” of services in Colorado and are happy to float all sorts of ridiculous proposals.

    The real problem is that once in place, the regulation never goes away. I come from western Pennsylvania. Every time I go back east to visit I’m amazed at how little has changed except that there are whole neighborhoods that are emptying out. Housing prices are at bargain levels compared to Colorado but you have to pay the insane property taxes, gas taxes, etc. And all the schools are brand new and have stadium lights, locked doors and lots of teachers. Cops everywhere. Meanwhile the population that hasn’t left is on pensions and the growth industry is health care. No politician will ever propose getting rid of regulation, only more. And one of the recent candidates for governor actually proposed taxing retirement benefits, which would extinguish the one beacon of hope for Pennsylvania. Of course everyone loves to talk about the good old days when the mills and mines were running full capacity and Uncle just had to tap that well for income.

    • Ya know what’s interesting too, Ready? I find that when ever I find some nice little spot with no neighbors….6 months after I set up shop there, someone’ll come along and build right to me! And once there are two houses, it just multiplies from there. People are like flies…one comes, and they all gather around. The place could have empty for the last 200 years…but once they see one or two people move in, they all have to come!

      My natural inclination is to want to be off on my own. I see a house, and say “I don’t want to live near someone”- but I guess others think the oppossite- “O-K boys! Someone moved in, so it’s no longer wilderness! We won’t be all alone! Lets go and get as close to that guy’s place as humanly possible! ChAAAAAAAAArge!!!”.

      And I think the governor of PA has a nefarious plan. He doesn’t give a damn about the dying towns nor the people who have lived and worked and paid taxes there all of their lives…. He knows that the middle class fleeing NYC and Long Island, with their six-figure civil-service union pensions think that PA is a quaint bargain (Hell, my sister’s fambly moved there, and their son is a local pig there!)- The gov would just as soon see all those retired miners and other low-income people fall off the face of the earth or move to Detroit or Cleveland, to make way for the rich NYers….whose handsome retirements he can tax- and they will tolerate it, because the high property taxes in PA are a quarter of what they paid on LI or in NYC for a much smaller house which cost 4 times as much as their new palace in PA. (What he doesn’t realize is once the trauma of NY wears off, in a year or two, PA and it’s crappy weather suddenly doesn’t look so good, so those same exNYers pick up and move to FL or SC or AZ- which is why PA has a net loss of people every year- and unlike NY, isn’t replacing the escapees with foreigners)

      These pioliticians are as crazy and criminal as the old Roman emperors!

      • I remember the New York/Jersey ex-pats swarming into State College and driving up cost of living to the point that if you didn’t already own you weren’t going to be able to on the standard pay scale unless you wanted to live way out of town and deal with the daily bumper to bumper commute. One of the many reasons I left, along with the cult-like behavior of most Penn State university employees.

        • Hehyepyepyep, RK.

          Where my sister is in eastern PA., -being now comprised on about 50% NYers- they’ve driven up the housing prices to the point where no locals can afford them; and the pols have of course raised the property taxes- which now seem outrrageous to the locals….but seem like a great bargain to the NYers, who were paying that much 20 years ago on a house that was half the size in NY.

          I mean, they have freaking condos outside of SCRANTON going for over $250K!!!!!

          • I visited Scranton a decade ago. Didn’t seem like a 250K condo place then. Gave me that city that is still hanging on vibe. People seemed nice but it was clear the glory days passed decades ago.

            • Exactly, Brent. Scranton has been the laughing-stock of the northeast since I was a kid. But now NYers are moving to the surrounding “suburbs”, and they’ve been putting up fancy apartment complexes and condos just in the last few years that no local could remotely addord- nor would want to live in.

              My sister’s sister-in-law bought one….forget the exact price, but it was somehwere between $240-$279K. It’s insanity!

              The classic make-your-new-digs-into-the-exact-model-of-what-caused-you-to-leave-the-old. And the funny thing is: The area doesn’t have one good thing going for it. The weather is horrible, summer and winter; the topography is very hilly; and between the snow and ice in winter, and the topography, it makes it very tough to get around. (But it’s one step better than the Poke-your-nose mountains).

  4. I like my area well enough as far as its current peacefulness and low yuppie count goes.. but the clovers are strong in number here, pigfucker signs out front of every other house, “price of honor” piggy license plates (what honor??), AGW and blue-nosing fogie harassment of “speeders”.. mcmansion developments continue getting plopped down where forest should be and meanwhile folks just keep brainlessly popping out their spawn for their yuppie clover legacies.. It’s grosser than I ever could’ve imagined.

  5. My area southwest of Austin has gotten nuts, even in just the six years I’ve been here; my plan is to hold it until the taxes get too bad versus what I get paid or I get neighbors whose house I can see. We get a lot of people from out west driving up the prices – like you said, they’ve crapped their own bed and are now looking to soil another.

    I’ve got my rural Alabama property, though – the county seat is a run down town with one four-way stop. Only a couple of traffic lights in the whole county. Nobody goes there – rural Alabama is scary.

  6. Yep. When I moved here 17 years ago, I had no neighbors, and it felt like I was out west (When out west was still a good place to be).

    Now I’m surrounded by houses. Yeah…it’s not exactly the suburbs yet- and things are still pretty well spread out- and except for me, there are no ex-city people YET…. But still…it’s not the great place I moved to. And now that the county has gone wet recently, just as I predicted, you now see pig-mobiles every time ya go to town- whereas just 2 years ago, you’d almost never see one.

    The value of my property has increased- but there’s nowhere left to go that’s any better; and I don’t want to move again, since I intend to vamoose from the US in the near future…..

    And this is a rural one-traffic light county, far from any city (too far to commute) so it tends to keep outsiders away- so thank goodness, no subdivisions or anything like that close by, YET…..

    But I’m sure, as more retirees from the cities with lucrative pensions realize that the typical go-to places are filling up and turning to crap….they’ll be heading here. 🙁

    And even the locals are changing- as the older people get older, and the young’uns are coming of age, ya get more of a city vibe. The old cashiers in the stores who called you “hun” are being replaced with millenials who don’t even talk because they have one eye on their smartphone; and good old simple farm folk, like my neighbor, who has never even tasted alcohol, are being replaced by meth-heads; and instead of farming and working at honest trades, the young’uns are all clamoring for government jobs (Including AGWs), or for jobs at the hospitals in the bigger towns.

    The little town pop. 1500 which is the county seat of my county (Where the traffic light is!) was fairly busy when I moved here- now it is dying. Normally, I’d say that is a good thing, as it would indicate a coming reduction in population- but these days, I’d say it is just going to mean more government-sponsored make-work businesses and subsidized housing/apartments, and tax-funded recreation/tourist traps, etc. to keep it alive and populated artificially, with socialists and people who don’t give damn, instead of the former farmers and land-owners and small-bidness owners who made it a great place once upon a time.

  7. The worst aspect of these CBérs is the way they cognitively dis their new reality. They´re almost always fleeing some defective or destitute area, yet fail to understand they are the very thing they are fleeing from.

    Rosie´s with pockets full of posies like in the song from the bubonic plague days.

    Unlike the norwegian rats that carried that sickness, these Suburbonic plague carriers are feral bipedal mammals that are nearly indistinguishable from actual autonomous individualistic human beings.

    Eric after a commute on the lethal byways of SW Virginia
    https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/ore-man-survives-black-death-plague-graphic-images/3/

    EPA demos
    Tus fans son 82% hombres
    Tus fans on 18% mujeres
    Los de menos 24- 9%
    Los de edad 25-34 25%
    Los de edad 35-44 23%
    Los de edad 45-54 22%
    Los de edad 55-64 15%
    Los de más de 65+ 6%

    Demos de sitios web comparables
    Vuestros fans sois 100% tréboles malvados e inútiles

    • Hi Tor,

      Yes, exactly! They flee an area like Northern Virginia, to get away from the Hell they created… and then they recreate the same Hell in a place where it had not existed before their arrival.

      PS: Where the heck have you been?

      • Eric, Michael nailed it for the Austin area. We lived in Cedar Park, about 35 miles from Austin in 76. It was a remote ranch house with plenty of peace and quiet. Late that year we moved back to very rural west Texas. Not quite 2 years later I was back again trucking after back surgery.

        Being young and bored easily I got my fill of local trucking and went back OTR. My first run out with an old hand along to assess my abilities, I came over a hill 40 miles N of Austin, a road I’d driven for years and what had been an intersection with the road I was on having the ROW was now an intersection with signal lights. By the time I got out south of Austin it was hard to realize it was the same place….in only 2 years. I didn’t travel to Austin much but every time the difference was astounding.

        The last time I was there, over 20 years ago, it was a literal yankee hellhole.

        My cousin who was raised in the same area as me had been living in Palmdale for a couple decades working in the Lockheed skunkworks. He had a bidness trip to Austin and was eager to check it out, maybe retire there since UT was his alma mater. Back home in Ca. he described his nightmare experience of the 3 million plus Austin he couldn’t have imagined. He still lives in Palmdale.

        That’s been about 20 years ago. Neither of us want to venture close to it now. One reason I like the west Texas oilfield is I rarely have to venture to the big Texas cities.

        3 years ago I had to make a couple of runs to Seagoville out SE of Dallas. What a nightmare getting across the DFW metroplex.

        I detest driving to Ft Worth to the Richey Bros auction and that’s not in the bad stuff.

        I’m happy as a pig in cool mud driving all day and never getting near a town.

        Just to show how much things have changed, a friend was in a wreck and required a few surgeries. He let his CDL lapse so had to take the tests over. In his driving test he had a young black woman as an evaluator. He’s driving along, left hand on the steering wheel and right on the shifter even though he didn’t need to change gears. The trooper made the statement “I guarantee you won’t pass this test if your right hand isn’t on that steering wheel”. Hell, MY right hand doesn’t even know where the steering wheel is located when I’m just cruising.

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