Fuck, I thought I was going a little nuts. But turns out I wasn’t — at least not in the way that I suspected.

Scientists and journalist have sworn over and over in numerous articles that no one ever claimed or wrote that a new ice age might be imminent during the 1970s and 1980s, despite me and many others having very clear memories of just such a thing.

Knowing the corruptibility of memory, I just assumed I was misremembering somehow, despite the fact that I recalled it being conventional wisdom that a new ice age was likely.

But no, it did happen.

Third, the climate change movement inflicted a disastrous own goal on itself by insisting that nobody with scientific credentials ever claimed that an ice age was imminent, when anybody over fifty whose memory is intact knows that that’s simply not true. Any of my readers who are minded to debate this point should get and read the following books from the 1970s and 1980s:  The Weather Machine by Nigel Calder, After the Ice by E.C. Pielou, and Ice Ages by Windsor Chorlton and the editors of Time Life Books. These were very popular in their time, and they’re all available on the used book market for a few bucks each, as the links I’ve just given demonstrate. Nigel Calder was a respected science writer; E.C. Pielou is still the doyenne of Canadian field ecologists, and the third book was part of Time Life Book’s Planet Earth series, each volume of which was supervised by scientific experts in the relevant fields. All three books discuss the coming of a new ice age as the most likely future state of Earth’s climate.

Glad my memory wasn’t that faulty. I’m not over 50, but I started paying attention to such things 15-20 years before most people do (when I was seven or eight, specifically.)

Why would the climate change movement do such an idiotic thing, claim that something that millions and millions of people remember never happened?

How does that even help?

So strange to see something from one’s small hometown just pop up on Reddit.

Before I even read the words (there are numerous towns yclept “Lake City” in the US) I recognized the streetscape behind the sign. Funny how a place gets into your brain like that.

For the interested — all none of you — here is the approximate spot from which that photo was taken, within 20 feet.

Know that spot and that park well because it’s three blocks from the library and as a kid I tried to get someone to take me there as often as I could cajole, beg or guilt someone into driving me that far.

The reason this guy declined a job offer from Amazon is the same reason I’d never live in a “hub” American city again: Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC, or any place like that.

Right now, I make a fairly high salary in a pretty cheap area. Not as inexpensive as most of Florida, but my salary here is much larger than any I could earn in FL and here I could find a new job in a week (real recruiters contact me nearly every day with actual interviews and offers).

In Seattle (where I once lived), I’d need to make about $300,000 a year to have the same standard of living as I do here. Think anyone is going to pay me $300,000 a year?

Of course not.

And on the flip side, if I said “screw it” and decided I wanted to work much less or do something else, here I could live on almost nothing. In Seattle or LA or San Diego, to have any sort of decent middle-class-ish standard of living (ok housing, food, etc) you need to earn at least $60,000 a year.

Here, I could get by on 1/3 of that and not suffer.

What’s the reason for moving to a hub city, then? The housing stock is worse and is also ridiculously expensive. The jobs don’t pay enough to remunerate one for all the inconveniences and expense of living in such a place. And they are only getting worse and more untenable for anyone not making well above six figures, so your standard of living will decline over time.