Carrying Capacity

Morning routine. Added a lived story to the inventory. SESIG on tires, thrusters and rural fiber. Rethought the Philomath Salon talk. Researched data center operators. Lower-body workout with four new highs. Beers at Treebeard's. Dinner at Lucca Taverna. Suds.

A small SESIG, a sharper Salon thesis, and four new highs at the gym

Events and activities that occurred on Friday, October 16, 2026

The day started well before dawn, and the quiet hours went to the story inventory. I added a new lived story, "The Work Was Right, the Timing Was Early," which joins the small collection of kernels I keep ready to tell. Its title carries most of the lesson: being correct and being on time are two different achievements, and only one of them gets credit.

Friday's SESIG was a small, easygoing group with no agenda, which is often when it is best. Jon opened with his tire troubles, and that led to a good question about what electric cars really wear out. He cited an analysis suggesting EVs make less brake dust but leave more tire on the road, so the two roughly cancel, and Jim added that tire dust has become a serious urban pollutant now that diesel soot is mostly gone. At Jon's urging I shared the new Tesla Roadster demo, the one with cold-gas thrusters fed by very high-pressure air tanks that let the car hop, somersault and land itself. The group wanted to know about fault modes and flight duration, and I pointed out that the risk falls not only on the occupants but on everyone around them. From there the conversation drifted through Starlink trains in the night sky, the painfully slow arrival of rural fiber, Jim's twenty-year-old solar panel that melted its own glass, and Larry's tour of electric dirt bikes before he left early for a test ride. Starting this week, the meeting records and transcribes itself, so conversations like this one no longer simply evaporate.

The news from Bend sat underneath the whole morning. A shooting at an elementary school there left three children and a teacher dead, and the attacker was stopped by a father of two students at the school. There is not much to add to that, except that it was close to home.

The real work of the day was admitting that my Philomath Salon talk was not good enough. Listening to it in my head, it came across as a little milquetoast, and it never quite got to the point. Driving to meet friends that afternoon, I found the point: carrying capacity. Every place has a limit on its grid, its water and its land, and data centers are being sited as if those limits do not exist. The cost and tradeoff comparisons I had built the talk around become evidence for that thesis instead of the thesis itself. I want the tone to treat the operators as villains with a real case, not cartoons, so I researched ten of the major ones and scored them on whether they bring their own power, whether it is clean, how they use water, whether they pay their share of the grid, and how transparent they are. The talk is on Sunday, October 25, and for the first time it feels like it has a spine.

The afternoon workout was lower body at a crowded gym, with two machines out of order and a fair amount of improvising. It still produced four new twelve-rep highs, on the leg press, leg extension, hip adduction and calf raise. Progress like that is quiet, but it accumulates.

The evening began with beers at Treebeard's with Tim, Michael and Mary, plus Leo, Michael and Mary's poodle, after a text exchange consisting mostly of cryptic punctuation. Dinner followed at Lucca Taverna, and on the way home I stopped at Suds to see Aaron and to be around people for a while longer.

Carrying capacity kept following me home. It is a good lens for a region deciding what to build, and an uncomfortably good one for a person deciding how much to take on. Every place has its limits, and the honest thing is to plan around them rather than pretend they are not there.