Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: life

  • Trump Okays Kei Cars

    So I’m reading the Canadian Blog ‘Blazing Cat Fur’ at https://blazingcatfur.ca/2025/12/05/from-full-size-to-fun-size-trump-gives-kei-cars-the-green-light/ and I realize that Trump has instructed the folks who regulate the auto industry to “clear the path for the production and sale of kei vehicles in America, following his recent trip to Asia, where he saw pint-sized cars flooding the streets.”

    In Montana, we’re used to seeing 25-year-old Kei cars on the street – federal laws make it easier to import those little white pickups (and vans, etc.) Now we have the President making it legal to build, and buy the little rigs new. I’m upbeat at the idea – of course I have already owned a couple of them, and did, 30 years ago, drive a Yugo.

    Trump said “If you go to Japan, where I just left, and if you go to South Korea and Malaysia and other countries, they have a very small car—sort of like the Beetle used to be with the Volkswagen—they’re very small, they’re really cute, and I said, ‘How would that do in this country?’” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy heard the message – and folks from the auto industry were also there.

    So we may wind up with little cars that look like this Suzuki Jimny – not a lot different than the old Samurai (full disclosure: I had an old LJ10, and am still driving a Vitara):

    Or a Daihatsu Copen (In Japan, Toyota is Daihatsu:

     I was talking with a friend yesterday – each of us drives an old, high mileage pickup. Those 300 thousand mile pickups are paid for. The old, small pickups that we drove through the last 20 years of the Twentieth Century have disappeared. I’m hoping that, with Trump’s support, I’ll be able to write a check for an American built new pickup that looks something like this Honda:

  • An Evening Like 1917

    It’s a little over a century since my grandparents bought the place in Trego. With the power outages, we’ve experienced a little of what their ordinary day and evenings were as the season moved toward Christmas – the wood stove keeping the house warm, and, for use, battery powered lanterns, where their light was kerosene. A kettle on the stove for coffee or tea – and no internet or electricity. I suspect we’re a lot less able to keep ourselves entertained during the long winter nights – but as I look at my stash of harmonicas, I realize it was my grandmother’s harmonica that led me to playing them – and that I can play harmonica in the dark as well as the light. Their power outages didn’t affect a refrigerator or freezer.

    I have a shallow well – and I’m realizing that a solar panel on the south wall of the pumphouse, charging a 12 volt battery, can power an inverter, so that we can keep water running by going to the pumphouse, turning the inverter on, and taking the pump off the grid and plugging it into the inverter. Our record power outage, to date, is 18 hours – and keeping the water running, without having to start a generator, has some advantages.

    The grill on the porch runs on propane – and it will take little effort to add a propane burner to handle a coffee pot or scramble eggs. Admitted, the top of the wood stove already does that – but it takes little to avoid the occasional return to pre-electric existence.

    Still, I suspect we have lost a lot of the family social interaction with the luxury of rural electricity. I think of being a Trego kid in the early sixties, when there were only two Spokane TV channels – and reading the entire encyclopedia before finishing the eighth grade. If nothing else, it made high school a bit easier.

    The connection with my grandparents is not strong – my grandfather died shortly after I turned 5. There were a lot of things that couldn’t be shared. But the occasional power outage does offer a little understanding of what their lives were like in the early days of Trego.

  • Actuarial Thoughts on Turning 76

    As the 75th year moves to the 76th, there are some actuarial thoughts that come to mind. Table 10 (Social Security Administration) gave me a life expectancy of 65 years and 3 months at birth – obviously, since 52% of my age cohort is still on the grass side (as opposed to the root side) we’ve made some long strides in medicine, health and life expectancy. It’s not until the 80th birthday that 50.7% of us will be gone.

    That translates to a calculated mean life expectancy of 11.29 more years at my next birthday. On the other hand, if I’m still kicking for that 87th birthday, the table shows another 5.6 years – and nearly 30% of the original birth cohort will be there for the 87th birthday.

    I suppose that living is kind of one of those habitual things. I can’t help feeling fortunate for the many advances that have occurred in my lifetime. So what do I plan to do with those next ten years? When I lived past the June, 2012 expiration date my oncologist gave me, I came to the conclusion that my best purpose was to look out for wife and daughter. It’s been a good purpose – but the next ten years are for my grandkids. I want to teach the little ones to sail – and I think I can do that on the pond, by combining a small lateen sail with a slow hull. I want to teach them marksmanship – and I will probably start with airguns and little steel chickens, pigs, turkeys and rams. If the health holds out, we’ll combine forest management with entrepreneurial attitudes as we continue thinning the woods. I may not ride a bicycle to their house – but I am sure that they will ride bikes to mine. Bicycles are a good place to develop mechanical skills – and seven speeds seem like plenty to me. There is a chance that we can rebuild the fences, and get a few Guernsey or Jersey cows. Remi already has his two little goats – and one watches his little crawling brother through the window. By the time a kid is ten, leading and brushing a dairy heifer is a reasonable task. At ten, a kid can learn the mechanics of a single or double barrel break in the middle gun. And, with any luck, I will be able to share the joy that can be found in mathematics, in reading, design and research. It is enough. Not everyone has a 76th birthday with so bright a future.

  • Veteran Confusion

    So I get an email that tells me that Veteran’s Day sales have been extended. I’m not a veteran – I had to damn near beg the physician to get a 1Y deferment instead of a 4F. Really don’t know why it was important to me, but I suspect it was my mother’s tone of voice when she talked about 4F’s. Anyway, South Dakota has some very active Veterans coordinators in each county, and, so near as I can tell, the one in my county learned the clearance I had – since I had access to air photos that showed locations of missile silos as well as agriculture, and wanted to recruit me as a veteran. I’m not real sure of his motivation, and he was disappointed to learn I wasn’t eligible for his services. Somehow, I didn’t disappear off his list, and the American Legion offered membership. Again, I gave a polite thanks and explained that I didn’t qualify. And that ended the folks who were mistaking me for a veteran.

    Until I wore an old T-shirt Dad had given me from the Kenneth Whiting’s 50th anniversary. The shirt was probably 20 years old, and I wore it into Great Clips. The hair stylist looked at me, looked at the shirt, and long story made short, I walked out with a high and tight haircut and a veteran’s discount. The next stop was Cabela’s – where the T-shirt and the haircut got an unsolicited 5% discount on a couple boxes of ammunition. Didn’t notice until I got home and looked at the receipt. Then Lowes, and a 10% discount. I now only wear the shirt around Trego. It’s too easy to be the accidental stolen valor kid. The closest I came to actual service was accompanying a National Guard officer to South America when I was an adjunct professor for the Navy grad school – I’m pretty sure academic rank doesn’t count – though Dad was pleased that I somehow got into his Navy.

  • The Lady in the Latrine

    In telling this story, I have to go back about 40 years, to my first time teaching college. Somehow, Colorado had gotten off on the idea of workfare – that people physically capable of work should have a job to qualify for welfare benefits.

    The science building had a janitor – nice guy, worked a 4 to midnight shift, which meant that he had the time to clean the classrooms, labs and offices when they were empty. The building, built back in the sixties, had the janitor’s workspace located in the men’s room. I was a bit surprised at about 3:00 pm one afternoon, I headed for the head, and was greeted by a woman about my age and her 10-year-old daughter as I walked into the room. She explained she was there to help our janitor, I agreed that was nice – and then I walked down the hill to the restroom in the admin building. There was no point in warning my colleagues by sharing the story – they would have laughed at me.

    Turned out, I should have said something. I was one of the younger faculty – I didn’t think much of an 80 yard walk, outside, to find a facility that didn’t have a pre-teen girl and her mother as observers. And, having moved to southern Colorado from northern Montana, there weren’t many afternoons when the trip required a coat. But a lot of my colleagues were in their sixties. Now I recognize the difference. Then I didn’t. When the college president realized the hardship on our old biology instructor – past 70 and with prostate problems calling for a lot of trips – well, our little school went out of being a site for the workfare program.

    It probably seemed like a good idea – but reality has a way of showing the problems that come with good ideas. Single parents and the janitorial space located in the men’s room created a situation where working for the welfare benefits cost the school more in (male) faculty time than the help cleaning the building was worth. And unpaid labor didn’t leave her many options for childcare.

  • Thinking About H1-B Visas

    I see that Governor DeSantis (Florida) is moving to eliminate H1-B visas from Florida’s university system. My experience with the H1-B visa holders is limited – and at least ten years out of date – yet DeSantis’ comments match my experience: “They come in with these brokers who make a fortune of this with arbitrage. They bring them in and they are indentured to the company. So, the company can basically pay them low and they say no, we got to do this. You have to prove there are no Americans. They will put an ad in the classified sections of a newspaper. Nobody reads that section of the newspaper… It’s all become a total scam”

    The article explained the numbers: “The H-1B program exists to bring workers specifically from India and China: • 283,397 Indians in 2024 • 46,680 Chinese • Philippines came in at #3 — with 5,248.” My limited experience confirms DeSantis’ comments – Prasanthi was from India, and asked me to serve as a reference on her job applications as a way of getting out of the ‘indentured servitude.’ The last I heard from her was a very appreciative thank you note as she managed to get a job out of SDSU. She was hired to teach faculty to do distance-education courses, and it was a job I would not have taken – the technique was to assign busy work instead of academic inquiry. I will admit, I’m no fan of busy work. It fits right in there with group projects.

    The point is, she was hired to do a job that this American would not do. I can’t say H1-B is always bad – but she was hired to teach me to present in a way that didn’t really improve my students’ research skills (in my opinion – I could be wrong, but don’t believe I am). DeSantis said  “I don’t understand how is that specialized knowledge that only someone from these places can do. A $40,000 a year job working as the assistant at the athletic department? That’s an abuse of this whole idea. If there are things that the universities need, that somehow they just can’t find in Florida, to me, they, of all employers, would be the ones most responsible for why they can’t find what they need.”  Like I said, his comments are pretty much in line with my experience.

    Yet I learned a lot from working with Prasanthi – that there is a color discrimination in India that exceeds our own cultural racism, and that was a reason to accept the limitations of the H1-B to get to America. As I look at immigration, both legal and illegal, I realize that there is a lot more opportunity here than over there. And it seems to me that the difference between coming into the US as a mojado or with an H1-B isn’t so great – either way, it’s better to be in the land of the big PX.