I totally want to ride my mountain bike to work and not take the yokel-local bus or my big jacked up truck to work if at all possible today. I think I might be in luck, as it looks like the rain will pull off in the next hour or so, as the skies lighten up.
The new ramp from Cherry Avenue to Albany County Rail Trail is now officially open, 🚲 though for about three weeks now I’ve been dodging the barricades and using it before the politicians had their public masterbation celebration with the cutting of the ribbon 🎀. Honestly, I much prefer that route to riding through the squiggly piggly suburban sprawl route, past the wealthy woke houses with their chemical lawns and overflowing garbage bins every Monday morning and SUVs spewing chemicals into the air. The ones that pretend to recycle and give a damn with their solar panels on their roofs. ☀️ Says the boy with the big jacked up truck who recycles mostly using fire to turn shit into carbon dioixde for the plants. 🔥 And dump the endless seeming piles of banana 🍌 peels and apple cores at my parents 5 acres in the sticks.
But it’s a much nicer ride once I reach the ramp and are plunged into the quietness of the rail trail, 🐐 as I continue to listen to more about Goat Farming for Dummies on my Hoopla Audio Book I got out of the library. 📚 Then it’s down to the ghetto, watching for the hungry welfare recipients as they never watch or give right away as the pull out of their subsidized housing in their bling-bling SUVs. And then it’s under the rumbling and falling apart Interstate 787 that the DOT and it’s contractors keep trying to patch and keep in service for a few more years. 🚗 Then past the garbage recycling plant, where they pull out the metals for the scrap yards and ship the plastics and paper mostly to landfill or maybe China where a market exists. And the stink of the sewage plants 🚽 where they scrape off the solids and burn them and then dump them atop the garbage heap in the Pine Bush. It beats driving, and it’s a chance to learn more about horney buck goats and producing your own meat and milk. My parents did the goat thing for many years when they were young. I’m less excited about dairying though, it’s so much fucking work if you don’t do it professionally. 🐮 Goats are great if you have a lot of trash land you want to get rid of the brambles and invasives, turn the trash into meat and manure. 🥩 💩 Just like hogs are great if you want to tear up the land and manure it into good earth 🌎 for growing shit. 🌱
Like usual I rode my bike downtown in the pitch black, through the Corning Preserve keeping an eye 👁️ out for muggers and drug dealers, then the later local bus home, and banged my way out to suburbs as it’s too dark to do the rail trail and after hours riding is supposedly banned though I’m not sure there is a ton of cops out there patrolling the trail, but who knows what sketchy characters hang out there in the pitch black. Got home, had more green pea soup 🍽️ but not too much as it’s made me so gassy. 😲 Some more homemade bread dipped in balsmatic vinger, then as a dessert I cooked down some cranberries 🍒 with Stevia, oatmeal and peanut butter powder as an excellent desert. Totally enjoying cranberries while their a thing in the holiday season, this morning was cranberry pancakes, with some banana, oatmeal, and carrot 🥕 in the mix. Dead asleep by 7:30 under my electric blanket just like a girly man who refuses to turn on the heat, up at 4:30 AM with the Teat Strippers once again 🐮 reading 📖 a book called The Heart of the Homestead. Dreaming of a life in the mountains that smells like cow shit and wood smoke, something like Allegany County minus of course the burn ban and the woke gun laws.
I like to add carrots to nearly every meal as it adds fiber and filling without calories, plus all that beta caratine helps improve my vision 👀. That said, six weeks out of LASIK, my vision at night is excellent, especially at night, with the last symptoms of the procedure – namely the haloes of street lights and headlights fading away – and overly bright, blown out reflective street signs being readable again. It’s amazing both how crystal sharp my day vision is and how much better I see at night. 💩 It seems like such a waste to send such high-quality poop to the landfill, I much prefer burying my shit in the woods, and the humanure handbook is an interesting read, but even a conventional outhouse is a step up from the shit world of burn fossil fuels and landfill everything as we steal from the colored and poor world we all live in.
Maybe I’m too sympathetic to conservative causes, but I find it difficult to support a government welfare program that essentially is killing people. SNAP provides a modest benefit to the very poor who otherwise would go hungry but it also encourages bad eating habits that are leading to diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure and early death. Expensive complications whose health coverage is picked up by tax dollars. Top purchases on SNAP include meats, often hamburger, soda and processed food. Things wrapped in excessive glossy plastic packaging. Hamburger Helper will a glass of soda might temporarily forestall hunger but it’s killing the body. There are no restrictions on SNAP besides it must be food or an artificial food “product”, can not be alcohol or tobacco or warm when purchased. But it can be fully prepared like a hot pocket or TV dinner, ready to be tossed in the microwave and then the packaging in the dumpster.
For women with infants and young children an enhanced benefit is available known as WIC. Unlike SNAP, it is a comprehensive nutrition program, that covers specific foods that have been determined to be healthy for infants and young children to avoid health complications due to malnutrition during infancy. It’s a good program, hardly controversial. But it as retailers and farmers note, much more complicated to administer as and a lot fewer retailers accept WIC. Would farm stands and farmers markets accept SNAP if they had to go through the limitations and paperwork of WIC? I would argue they should exempt direct to consumer sales like farmers markets from lists of healthy foods.
Big retailers and even corner stores could accept a SNAP like WIC program. But many object – especially the corner stores which have lower sales and it can be difficult to keep fresh fruit and vegetables fresh. One option might be frozen fruits and vegetables. Other small retailers say they don’t use bar codes and tracking individual purchases would be impractical. Indeed, many more retailers currently accept SNAP then do WIC. But a lot of the opposition, couched in helping the local bodaga and small rural retailer is actually hiding the fact that soda and processed food sales are so profitable. Even Walmart would cringe if they couldn’t sell soda or processed foods to SNAP recipients.
Truth is if SNAP became restrictive like WIC, a lot of retailers who don’t currently accept WIC due to all the limitations on what is covered, would start to accept a WIC-style SNAP program. There is a lot of money to be made by selling products to those with SNAP benefits. Billions and billions of dollars. Even rural retailers and bodagas who currently do not do WIC would feel it necessary to adopt the systems the necessary to cover such purchases. WIC lists can be confusing, but retailers could support such customers by labeling what products on the shelf are eligible for purchase with the SNAP like WIC program.
The health benefits are clear to limiting what can be purchased with SNAP. But people say that’s overly putative to the poor. Grocers and farmers, and particularly processed food manufacturers would prefer added benefits to those who buy healthy, rather then limiting what can be purchased with SNAP. But I disagree. Tax dollars should be used wisely, SNAP recipients are free to buy whatever treats they want with their own money. Many may not have a lot of money for that occasional ice cream treat, but that doesn’t mean taxpayers should be the one paying. Indeed, arguing for limitations on what SNAP purchases doesn’t mean that there should be a reduced benefit – but only that the benefit should be designed to buy healthy foods to fuel healthy bodies and minds. It’s quite possible that a more restricted food list would lead many not to fully utilize their benefits, which could allow the government to expand the benefits for others who more fully use the program to fuel their bodies.
Few things annoy me more than the tacky poly vinyl chloride covered plywood McMansions located on Orchard Avenue as you drive out to Five Rivers Environmental Education Center on the outskirts of Delmar and Albany which are eating away at the farm land and woodlands on the outskirts of town.
Some of those houses are for the rich but many are just upper middle class. Many have 1kW of solar panels on their roof (even if they use 20 times their output in a day), pantries stocked with organic food and frying pans made out of certified recycled steel. Many of those people would be horrified to shop at Walmart, although their bit trash can is always full despite ever so carefully washing out their milk bottles and tin cans.
I am quite fine with these people paying more in taxes. They complain about the high cost of tuition at private schools, maintaining their SUVs, the cost of groceries and utilities. But they have a lot more than a lot of us, I think they should pay their fair share. I’m fine with them taking away their fancy house’s mortgage deductions and SALT deduction. If you can afford to live so high on the hog then you should pay more.
With all this talk of inflation as it comes to automobiles and homes, one thing rarely mentioned is the cost of all the new technology that has been mandated by government regulation. It’s funny how this was a big deal back in the early 1980s, but it seems like the current administration while often taking swipes at technology they view as liberal, has not taken a deeper look at how building codes and automobile safety standards are boosting costs. Maybe the higher costs are worthwhile – saving lives is important – and many technologies are inexpensive to adopt – but I have to wonder if we are pushing safety technologies too quickly, raising costs for what is at best dubious value.
Prior to summer vacation, I had Zillow on my phone and every day or so they would have not very helpful suggestions on the latest home to buy – 90% of them being just your typical white vinyl siding with asphalt roof in a suburban setting with virtually no acreage. Houses that are well, a place to live, a roof but hardly something I would want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on.
I get it, you have to live somewhere. Houses are seen as investments, superior to just renting, an expense with no return beyond that’s month of shelter. Beats living on the street, you need a place to shit and shower and get cleaned up so you can go to work and make money. Still, I can envision a long commute in an car, to an essentially suburban house next to a corn field that smells like cow shit. Zillow’s solution? How about a city house in the ghetto?
I just got frustrated. It’s not to say that aren’t some unique and even some interesting homesteads and off-grid cabins that pop up on Zillow from time to time, interesting options but all too far away from work. Everything around Albany seems to either be a property in the city, usually a bad neighborhood, or a fairly typically suburban house be it in a village, a suburban subdivision or next to a cow shit cornfield. Ready for your big screen television and sign-up for weekly garbage service and paying big utility bills to the power company.
I just don’t want any part of it. My apartment is diapolated and leaky, in bad shape but it’s cheap. Money forever gone, but I am also saving and investing a lot. Truth is much too soon, my parents will be gone, and I can probably buy their 5-acre homestead, even if it also isn’t exactly what I want but it will provide a place to live until my early retirement in around 15 years, when I am free to buy whatever, get that real off-grid cabin in a state that respects values and right to own whatever guns I want without guberment permission and have fires and burn my own shit.
But in the mean time, if I’m careful what I burn, and I do end up with their old homestead, I will be able to have goats and other livestock like they once did, and if I want to add solar, I can probably build rack mounts, add batteries, and by following code and working with an electrician have a largely independent, if grid tied system. And I can continue to compost, burn paper and maybe even some wrappers, take my own trash to the transfer station and avoid as much waste as possible.
