April 20, 2020 Night

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Good evening! Clear and 40 degrees in Delmar, NY. Calm wind. Temperatures will drop below freezing at Wednesday around midnight. ☃️

Not a terribly cold evening 🌃 but a bit chilly for mid to late April. Lots of stars ✨ out b ack but alas after a while it felt cool. Went for my evening walk 🚶 which was pretty quiet. Tuna fish 🐠 salad that I made up for dinner in a wrap. 🍥

Ended up going to Five Rivers Environmental Education Center this afternoon 🐸 because it was a beautiful afternoon although a bit chilly for most of the day. The Wi-Fi is much quicker than the mobile card on my work laptop and more reliable as it kept dropping out today. 📶 Despite living in the suburbs sometimes my phone service 📱 is funky here. Probably too many people using too little data with everyone home during Coronavirus. But also working on the free wifi meant that I didn’t have to careful watch my bandwidth and I could have personal social media and my blog up while I worked, upload photos 📷 and download videos for later watching.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 35 degrees at 5am. Four degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around April 10th. Calm wind. In 2019, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 52 degrees. The record low of 20 occurred back in 1875.

Tonight will have a Waining Crescent 🌘 Moon with 3% illuminated. The darkest hour is at 12:55 am, followed by dawn at 5:36 am, and sun starting to rise at 6:06 am in the east-northeast (73°) and last for 3 minutes and 2 seconds. Sunrise is one minute and 33 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 6:44 am with sun in the east (80°). Tonight will have 10 hours and 19 minutes of darkness, a decrease of 2 minutes and 41 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will have showers and possibly a thunderstorm, mainly before 4pm, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms after 4pm. Some of the storms could produce small hail and gusty winds. 🌦 High of 51 degrees at 11am. 10 degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around March 31st. Maximum dew point of 42 at 1pm. 🏖️ South wind 10 to 18 mph, with gusts as high as 31 mph. Chance of precipitation is 90%. New rainfall amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible. A year ago, we had cloudy skies in the morning with a few breaks of sun the afternoon. It was somewhat humid. The high last year was 72 degrees. The record high of 89 was set in 1923. 0.6 inches of snow fell back in 1947.❄

Doesn’t seem really nice tomorrow. 🚿 I am however thinking about going to the car wash to clean off Big Red which has some salt on him and it’s been a while since he’s been washed. 🚘 I checked and the car wash is still open as an Essential Business. There are a few things that I need that I should pick up at Walmart while I’m out but I’m thinking I should wait until I have a full list 📃 as every time you go out in public you risk getting Coronavirus. And that shit is real, and can make folks my age get really sick and not city folk alone. 🚜

In four weeks on May 18 the sun will be setting in the west-northwest (298°) at 8:14 pm,🌄 which is 30 minutes and 46 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had partly cloudy and temperatures between 73 and 46 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 70 and 48 degrees. The record high of 94 degrees was set back in 2017.

Looking ahead, Arbor Day 🌳 is in 1 week, 8 PM Sunset 🌇 is in 2 weeks, Flower Moon 🌕 is in 4 weeks, Memorial Day 🇺🇸 is in 5 weeks, June 🍹 is in 6 weeks, Last Day of Session 🏛 is in 2 months, Summer ️⛱️ is in 2 months, Average High is 80 🏖 is in 9 weeks and Inauguration Day 2021 👴🏻 is in 9 months.

🇺🇸🦅Only 32 days remain until the start of Memorial Day Weekend!🦅🇺🇸

Camel Hump

Red

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Evening camping along the East Branch at Campsite 5 after the dusting of snow had melted away. It was sunny but at cold afternoon.

Taken on Saturday April 18, 2020 at East Branch Sacandaga River.

God bless the grass. 🌾

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God bless the grass. 🌾

I am glad Joe Biden has said he supports legalization of marijuana on the federal level. I think it would have a lot of benefits to society if marijuana was federally legal.

For one, making marijuana federally legal would open finance up to farms that grow it and businesses that sell it. Banks can legally loan to hemp growers now with the federal regulations but their cautious for good reason – hemp is just cannabis with less THC and its easy for hemp to test too hot and be illegally diverted.

Even though hemp is now federally legal and is allowed in many states, it tends to be strictly controlled as hemp with too much THC is considered marijuana even if it’s not smoked or injested. Regulations over hemp make it hard for farmers to succeed.

Also legalizing cannabis would spur the hemp market – as if you are producing hemp as a primary crop you might as well produce cannabis on the side, similar to how many dairy farms which grow field corn for silage and high moisture corn feed also run farm stands with sweet corn.

There is a limited market for cannabis – as people can only smoke and ingest so much of it but hemp offers a lot of possibilities. A lot of products could be made with the fibers of hemp, beyond the boutique items currently sold. Cannabis might be a few acres on a farm, while hemp would be several hundred or thousand acres.

I think it’s an exciting agricultural crop and one that could get the younger generation interested in agriculture and plant science, especially in more urban areas. It’s also a great hobby for people to do on their patio, learn about plant genetics and growing their own food.

Myself, I’m not really interested in smoking pot. It’s rather expensive and not nearly as much fun as people claim. But I think we should end the war on drugs to help our cities, especially this potentially profitable agricultural crop that can be grown on a large scale, outdoors using many of the same field cultivation crops commonly used on farms across the nation.

Pennsylvania raises alarms on transfer of radioactive Three Mile Island reactor | StateImpact Pennsylvania

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Pennsylvania raises alarms on transfer of radioactive Three Mile Island reactor | StateImpact Pennsylvania

Each nuclear facility has a mandated trust fund — known as the Nuclear Decommissioning Trust Fund, or NDT, and financed with ratepayer dollars — to cover the costs of the decommissioning. Companies such as EnergySolutions and Holtec International, which bought the license of the shuttered Oyster Creek facility in New Jersey, hope to turn a profit by spending less than the dollars remaining in the trust fund to dispose of the radioactive waste.

Eric Epstein, chair of the anti-nuclear watchdog group TMI Alert, opposes the transfer and has petitioned the NRC for a hearing. Epstein argues that the transfer is an illegal taking of public funds.

“TMI-2 Solutions, an investment vehicle based in Delaware, wants to come in and clean the plant up, something that nobody’s been able to do in 41 years, and do it cheaper and faster than anybody else,” Epstein said. “… there’s over $1 billion in public money sitting in the decommissioning fund. And that’s what this is about, them coming in, taking the money, and then getting whatever is left over.”

Cod Pond

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Looking across Cod Pond out into the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest.

Taken on Sunday April 19, 2020 at Cod Pond.

I am fairly concerned about the recent drop in oil prices – dropping below zero on the futures market.

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I am fairly concerned about the recent drop in oil prices – dropping below zero on the futures market. ⛽

Why? I think these extremely low oil prices are leading to producers to not only cut off new wells but shut off existing wells. Once wells are shut off they often do not recover fully when they are turned back in.

When the economy recovers, there is quite likely to be a shortage of oil with new developments of oil stopped and restarted wells producing less than when they were shut in. High oil prices along with inflation generated by the extremely low interest rates and money expansion required to implement such rates sets us up for inflation.

To combat such inflation, the federal reserve will have to cut the money supply, which will drive up interest rates and make it a lot harder for everybody from those buying a car or house to a government building a bridge to get the money they need affordably.

That’s called stagflation! 📈