The Gas Station As Barometer Of Contract Status

This has nothing to do with fuel prices, I promise

Two decades ago, when even the dimmest of my old street-racing friends could see that I owned three Porsches, a new Land Rover Disco 4.6, and a brand-new suburban house of reasonable size despite being a criminal and reprobate, I frequently fielded requests from said friends to sit down and explain “how to get into computers”. About the first ten times this happened, I was genuinely excited about explaining Free Software and GNU/Linux to the friend in question, but even through the thick fog of my ignorant enthusiasm I eventually realized that all any of them ever wanted was a way to earn $150,000 a year with the absolute minimum of effort or learning on their part.

So I bought a few copies of The Turing Omnibus and started bringing them to these meetings. “Read any ten chapters and I’ll quiz you. Then I’ll find you a job — or, if I can’t find one for you, I’ll hire you myself.” I gave out maybe a dozen books. Two people made it through my requirements; they’re both on the West Coast earning mid six figures now. Everybody else got ten pages in and called me, saying, “I don’t want to do math. I want to make money with computers.”

“Then throw the fucker through the window of a bank, when it’s closed,” I replied. “Cause that’s the only way to make real money with computers while remaining totally and completely ignorant of how they work.” Dear reader, I was just as stupid as they were. Perhaps more so. In the years since then I’ve seen eight-figure sums made in computing by people who can’t turn on a PC/AT power supply without spraining a finger.

Oh well. I continue to love and recommend The Turing Omnibus at every opportunity. There’s so much fun stuff in there! I particularly like when the math involved defies conventional wisdom. Take “Chapter 12: Error Correcting Codes”, for instance. The error-correcting protocol sits at the foundation of modern life. It’s how we can transmit absolutely flawless digital data through: a crummy 300 baud Atari phone-coupler modem on a rural phone line, a flickering WiFi signal, those massive fiber trunks of THE BACKBONE, distant satellites consigned to the absolute-zero void of space.

If you want to get a sense of it, this local computer-dork meeting will perhaps be of use, minus the fact that one of these moronic incels decided to code a solution in Ruby, the Dumbest Programming Language Since All The Other Dumb Ones. (I’m not really that mad, but God made Larry Wall so we wouldn’t need shit like Ruby.) The long and the short of it is: if you need to be certain, you need to represent each piece of data via a larger “matrix” so low-level corruption doesn’t really matter.

Then you use TCP, with its endless chains of SYN and ACK, to make sure that each packet eventually gets there, and is reassembled. TCP is reliable, UDP is not reliable, which is why OnlyFans always shows you a complete nude without holes in the rendering but Call Of Duty will occasionally pop your enemies out in front of you like The Shrike in Hyperion.

(Yes, I read your book recommendations, too!)

Alright. I’m hoping all that talk about math scared off the various woke commissars of automotive journalism who scammed thirty day’s worth of Substack money out of their their parents in the hopes of catching me in a thoughtcrime punishable by death — and now we can talk about another kind of error-correction, namely: the neighborhood gas station.

Earlier this month, my son and I drove from Los Angeles to Denver via: Slab City, Joshua Tree, Needles, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Angel Fire, Raton, Colorado Springs, Fraser. This is our third West Coast trip in as many years and I enjoy nothing quite so much as watching John learn to understand the world through raw observation. Sometimes I give him a leading question or two.

“John, what’s different about the gas stations here in LA?”

“Uh… it’s a lot more expensive.”

“And?”

“There’s not as much room.”

“Why?”

“Because it costs more to have a gas station here?”

“Yes. Land is more expensive, and there are more taxes. What else.”

“They’re all dirty. There are no bathrooms. There’s not as much choice.”

“Alright, why?”

“Is that also because it’s more expensive?”

“It can be, yes. They don’t have the kind of margins that permit a massive Sheetz or Duchess store. But there’s also the matter of the people. Why do you think so much of the product is locked up? Why are the bathrooms always locked?”

“Uh, because the people steal and mess stuff up.”

“That could be. Why would they do that?”

“They’re poor, and they need to?” G-d bless my son and his desire to think the best of everyone.

“That could be it. Sometimes that is it. Other reasons?” And we go on. We had a similar conversation last year, on the way back from a riding trip to Bentonville. John demanded Little Caesars and I found the nearest one.

When I got off the freeway I realized that we were in Ferguson, Missouri. I slipped a Boker Applegate-Fairbairn into my waistband before we got out of the truck, because one of the “customers” between me and the door was beating his fists repeatedly into the glass next to said door and screaming. At our Little Caesars — maybe at yours, if you eat this junk — there are two coolers filled with drinks. You pick up your pizza, you take your drinks out of the cooler afterwards.

Not in Ferguson. The coolers are there, but they are empty and turned off. Drinks are handed over the counter after your order is verified. Even the “Pizza Portal”, a fun little device that lets you pick up your own order with a three-digit code, was turned off.

“What’s up with the Portal?”

“Turned that shit off a long time ago, yo.”

“Why, perchance?”

“The (local gentlemen) here will sit there and punch three-digit numbers until they get free shit.” This appealed to the Turing Omnibus reader in me.

“Are they starting from 000 and working up, from 999 and working down, or from 500 and choosing a direction?” The woman gave me the look that people in the inner city reserve for the mentally challenged and hopelessly lost.

“Man, how the fuck should I know?” To me, the answer is obvious; there’s more hand motion, and consequently more time, involved in starting at 500. It’s the only one of the three methods that doesn’t start with a double press of the same button. This measurement method of home row time/distance is why the Slashdot crowd was always obsessed with the idea of microphones that could figure out what you were typing by listening to the rhythm of your keystrokes.

I didn’t figure this lady for a /.er, particularly not a five-digit UID like your humble author, so I declined to engage her in further discussion.

Fast-forward to 9:45PM tonight. We’re picking up ice for tomorrow’s SCCA race. The gas station next to my rental house is packed with people who want to buy MegaMillions tickets. Many of them want to choose the numbers themselves; there’s no better way to publicly demonstrate your ignorance of math, and the fundamental zero value of one’s time, than manually picking a lottery number. Anyway, the ice box is unlocked and open, as it always is. Danger Girl and I could just take the ice.

“Go ahead, take the banana.”

I briefly considered taking the ice then returning tomorrow morning, when the lottery players are mostly asleep, and paying for it. Instead we stood and waited until the billion-dollar bloodlust of the mathematically illiterate was slaked, then paid, then took the ice.

In Los Angeles, the ice boxes are not left open outside. Because if they did, people would take all the ice. The restrooms are permanently locked. Because if they weren’t, people would defecate on the floor and shoot up on the toilets and sleep in there until the cops came.

I cannot express how bewildering this is to a suburban dad like myself, even though I was born and lived my youth in places where this was also the case, just a whole country away. I have become accustomed to the idea of gas stations and stores with no “loss control”, no locked bathrooms, no mechanisms to prevent larceny or criminality. Then I travel to either coast and am confronted with all of it at once.

Earlier this year my former co-workers and I rented a mansion in Malibu for a motorcycle test. The homes were worth multiples of anything I’ve ever had, anything I ever will have. The people who owned them could buy and sell me. Yet the closest fast-food restaurants to these mansions are feces-encrusted nightmares of aggressive homelessness, combative customers, and English as a sequestered language. The nearest gas station is an ARCO, the worst chain of anything in America. Until recently they didn’t even take credit cards. You had to pay with cash or give your debit card to a machine in the hopes it didn’t add two zeroes to the withdrawal out of sheer spite. I have never seen a functioning bathroom in an ARCO.

Did I mention that my local gas station will let you fill up before you pay? Not too far from my new house-in-progress there is a gas station with two old-fashioned pumps and no method of payment whatsoever. You take what you want then you go in. On a whim, I filled up my F-250 (imagine the Shadout Mapes of Dune yelling Aiyeeeee! at the total) then drove said bro-dozah around the corner, parking it fifty feet away. I walked back. Slowly. The lady looked up when I walked in, perhaps seven minutes after driving away with $133 of her fuel in my tank.

“I want to pay for pump 2.”

“Oh. How much did you get?”

Rural Ohio, like the past, is another country. We do things differently here. As they were once done in California, in the glorious postwar era where people moved there because it was cheap. The world as rendered in On Any Sunday. The secretive author of Up In The Valley, a delightful fellow with whom I’ve shared three hilarious dinners over the past few years, suggests that the climate in California is the state’s secret weapon, that people can’t tear themselves away from an eternal Mediterranean summer.

Similarly, once you have lived in a place where the icebox is not locked… what does John Updike say in Rabbit, Run?

“After being a wife a whore's skin feels tight.”

Note what people across this country did the very minute they thought “remote work” might just possibly be the way the future works: they bugged out of cities as fast as they could. City mice picked the suburbs clean, while the suburban mice went rural. Turns out that a significant percentage of Americans weren’t captivated by food trucks and bodegas and the chance to encounter man-high piles of trash bags on a daily basis. They were in the city because they had no other choice.

Now they have a choice.

Until, that is, some demon in human flesh is resurrected out of the abattoir where dormant corporate executives are stored, and all the Fugees From Downtown have to move back. Or drive, in an electric mobility solution with a razor-thin safety margin of available range. Or learn to live with less, much less. Many of them will choose the last option.

Go back? To people shitting on the street and screaming at children? To a place where every single thing you touch is at the very least dirty and at the worst medically dangerous? I don’t think we really need Disney+ that badly. Hey — couldn’t we, like, eat some of the stuff growing outside? And plant more when that’s gone?

Much has been made of cuck-companies like Target that placidly accept outrageous amounts of shoplifting/robbery/destruction in their urban stores. Starbucks is that way too; for a long time, they made a big deal of leaving the bathrooms open and just “dealing with” the resultant behavior. Easy for the executives and PR people to do, of course; they just handed over the dirty work to the dirty worker bees.

Now, even Starbucks is crying “Hold!” Target and the others can live with it a little longer, because they have a near-infinite profit margin on what they sell. Most of what you see in a Target was made in China for pennies on the Benjamin, shipped over by monstrous ships that individually do more harm to the environment than the entire Ford Super Duty model range, and left out on the shelves to rot by people hired at random. The law in parts of California says you can steal up to $900 of merch and it’s “decriminalized”. The joke’s on you, prole; $900 of Target merch is worth ten bucks at the source. Target will pay that ten dollars out of the profits from their stores in the suburbs and never think twice about it.

With sufficient profit, you can float off the ground. You can deny reality. You can pretend whatever you want: about your customers, about the state of the country, about basic aspects of humanity.

Gas stations don’t have that luxury. It’s never been a profitable gig, really. Your margins on your primary product are close to nothing; you run the store hoping people will leave their cars and spend money inside. Even there you’re shaved a little thin. Most of the stuff in a “C-store” is food. Perishable, locally made, not cheap ever and now priced to a breathtaking level even at the wholesale rate.

Furthermore, every security precaution you take actively reduces the amount of business you can do. If everything is locked up, you need more people to unlock it. If the bathroom isn’t available, people will go straight home instead. Every single thing you do to prevent stock loss annoys your customers.

Therefore, a gas station is like an error-corrected view of the area in which it is located. We use a matrix to fix pictures from outer space; we use a gas station to show us the raw truth of human interactions in a given area. It is a lens that shows you the current state of the social contract.

It’s not perfect, just the same way that a sufficiently troublesome form of “noise” or interference can deceive the best error correction algorithms. Sometimes the fellow who owns the station is just paranoid, or the corporation behind it has certain rules that must be followed regardless of stock loss or customer anger. All things being equal, however, I can tell you almost everything you need to know about a neighborhood with a quick tour of the gas stations.

There’s a special exception to this, of course, and that is The Airport. Even in the NYC airports, there’s not so much as a nod towards loss prevention. Everything is out and available to be taken, regardless of cost. Why is that? Where is the “error correction” for airport populations? Is it a question of airport population demographics, or a function of the consequences for misbehavior? As with certain parts of The Turing Omnibus, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.