Here’s photos of e-waste and discarded electronics in Ghana : Goats and Soda : NPR
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Studying the rural landscape 🐐
One of the things I find myself spending a lot of time lately is trying to understand the rural landscape and people’s relationship to land and property. The architecture and barns, the livestock raised, how people piece together a living in the country.
Methods of study vary. One is the simple just traveling to rural areas, riding rural roads on my bike. Climbing mountains and peering down into the valleys. Things I’ve done for years now, but now with a much more careful eye, trying to figure out what I actually want to some day not that far in the future incorporate into my life. Styles of architecture, layout of homesteads and gardens, livestock and even toys like ATVs, tractors and trucks.
But at the same time I’ve been doing a lot of reading and listening to e-books about farming and homesteading, books about the wilderness and how people relate to the land. In many ways it’s taking off my rose colored glasses on the topic. I grew up in the country, I know about barnyards and breaking ice to water ducks and feed dogs in the winter and all the smells and hard work that go along. Still maybe I didn’t think as much about stewardship and how much farmers of all stripes struggle to stay on the land, and the hustle to stay afloat selling what they can. Often it really is a fight for life against markets, pests, disease and weather. Or how 5 acre homesteads chew away at once vibrant farming lands. YouTube videos are good to get a look at every day operations of farms and homesteads but sometimes five hundred page books give you a lot more of the back story.
People will say I’m wasting my time in analysis and study, years of my life are rapidly fading away while rent checks fly out the door padding my landlords pockets. But I want to do it right, build the right homestead in the right location, be thoughtful not rushed. The time is not now but will come and armed with facts on all aspects of rural life, I will make better decisions. I grew up in the country and went to school in a small town, yet there is much more to learn.
Back on Cheese Hill 🧀
Just sitting here, staring at the Catskill Mountains much like three weeks ago. I’ve been coming up here a lot especially in the autumn. I should bring my shot gun and get my license but I’m fine just sitting here. I don’t eat that much meat anymore.
I know that cabin for sale out here that stole my heart out here was much too far from work,🏚️ but I do love it out here. Years ago when I was young – decades before this was state forest I used to come out here and just sit at the end of the road looking at the mountains. ⛰️ Plus out here was a good place to seek out homesteads with burn barrels to look at even in years after the ban. 🛢️ Mostly all gone fifteen years later. But even if I lived remote, I’d have those shit gun 🔫 laws of New York. My apartment is a mess, it needs a good cleaning but I’ve been away so long. Facing another winter there, I need to get more weather stripping around the door 🚪 that continues to rot away. Still it’s fairly cheap. Been quiet 🤫 the past few weeks as the landlord – dairy man has been busy harvesting not working on the unit next door. Money 💰 has been good this past year, between the high interest rates and the booming stock market. I can make the leap when I want but I don’t want to fall flat on my face, ☺️ and still kind of want to get in twenty years with the state for the higher pension amount.
Smoked some grass and forgot to tighten my kick stand 🏍️ before I went out riding. Bolt 🔩 bounced out and is gone but I found the kickstand and it’s a standard water bottle cage bolt 🍶 so I stole one from there and will replace by stealing another part of my old bike 🚲. Made me cranky for a while this morning but after lunch and some riding I’m feeling better. Plus that whole issue of my eyes 👀 being irritated from the contacts. I’m out of paper towels 🧻 so I didn’t wash my hands 👐 well enough before putting them in it seems.
Been thinking 💭 a lot about my use of the R statistical language. Is R a real programming language? It’s not a general purpose language like C or even Python and I wonder what value I get out of learning and using it every day. I think that’s why I’ve been so interested in learning and getting really good at C and now Rust. I do like a lot about Rust. But I’ve also been study a bit of modern Javascript and Java. Truth is a lot of the concepts can be used from language to language and for a lot of things I do R and the tidyverse are perfect. 🖥️ Still when I tell people I do most of my work in R, I just get snickers. Of course, a lot of scripts in the office are based around good ol Awk which is if anything far less of a language then R.
Landowner, not a homeowner
Eventually, I plan to become a landowner more then a homeowner. Land not just a place to have a home on, but land where I can call my own, use for my own purposes, study nature and wildlife, hunt and trap on. Public lands are a fantastic resource, but they aren’t really my own even though I temporarily occupy the lands.
As a landowner you become responsible not just for your home, but also maintaining the land to maximize habitat and value to you. There are many ways to use land, farming, firewood, timber, hunt, trap, and so forth. Careful methods of use can maximize both the value of the land to you and wildlife that lives on it.
Land is more important to me then any kind of home I would have on it. I don’t want to chop down the forest or develop it more, I’d much rather take an adapt an existing structure, and use as much of the land that I own for natural purposes — be it agriculture or forest property. I would like to meet as much of needs on-site as possible, from renewable energy to food, to an live with as small of an externalized impact as possible.
Delegitimizing government is a feature not a bug of Trump
If there is anything that I really like about Donald Trump is that he is making government less legitimate and heald in less esteem then it often has been in the past. I’m not at all convinced that government workers and politicians are all noble people, indeed most of them are there primarily for a job and getting paid.
Calling government work noble and declaring government workers to be heroes is simply an excuse to underpay government workers, have unsafe working conditions and generally be uncompetitive to the private sector. Parades for fallen cops and soldiers doesn’t make their work places safer or better compensated, it simply strokes egos without improving anything. And it causes cops and soldiers to do inferior work as they believe they are special for being underpaid and forced to work in an unsafe work environments. And it displaces jobs potentially done better privately.
Trump is tearing down the notion of “the people” in the courts, holding the government rather than individuals in contempt. A ruling of any court is inherently political, all judges are either elected or are appointed by elected officials. They have biaes they face when interpreting the law. He’s also reminding us how laws are often rigged to favor incumbents and established players – and while he likes to point at Democrats and liberals – it’s pretty obvious it cuts both ways.
It’s not to say there is no role for government. There is. But government service is no more noble than any private persuit, indeed cops and soldiers are just as essential as farmers, plumbers and software engineers and cell phone manufacturers. Truth is modern life is impossible without all facets of the economy and government workers really aren’t any more important to society than any other industry.
Clearing out after the rain ☔
Last night was clear until well after bed time when it rained for a while. It was foggy this morning but by eight the blue skies returned. Breezy but clear.
It’s nice to wake up another morning in the wilderness. 🌄 It’s quite autumn like this morning with a reasonable amount of color. 🍁 I’ll probably head out riding in a bit 🚵 and do some reading 📖 and just thinking 💭 and dreaming today.
Yesterday was such a busy day with remote work 💻 and I already have more label 🏷️ and data jobs to run but I’m thinking most of them can wait until Sunday. I’m thinking I can process a bunch of them all at once at the Rennselaerville Library. Plus I don’t know how much solar ☀️ I get at this campsite. 🏕️ Especially in the autumn with the leaves still on the trees 🌲 but the sun angle quite low. 📐
Continue to be a bit annoyed by the Drive Safe and Save app. 📵 It just complains every time I turn off the Bluetooth or enable power saving, and loves to remind me it’s willing to record a trip ⏺️, every time I am drunk or high as duck 🦆. What for? Saving $50 every six months – less than $10 a month. I get it if it inspires me to avoid crashes good but it seems to ding me for hard braking so randomly and never gets me for actual bad driving 🚘 like those almost crunch moments on the road 💥 or when I look down and see I’m actually speeding by quite a bit. It’s like riding my bike 🚲 to work to avoid paying the bus 🚌 fare or eating whatever crap is at the campaign committee to save on food at home. 🍲 Not that even waves money 💰 in the long run. I know, spend money on what you actually care about and not on the other crap.
Just kind of a cool and breezy morning today, ☀️ taking it slow, doing a lot of reading 📖. Trying to learn everything I can about the Rust programming language but truth is I just need to sit down and write code. You can be an expert on the borrow checker but it’s meaningless without practice. But it’s a cool morning. I do want to ride over to Mount Pisagh later on an to the OSI Parcel of Cheese 🧀 Hill and just enjoy the colors and the beauty of the day. It’s a Saturday so the pace of work slows down a bit but I do have a bunch of data jobs to process but maybe the can wait until Sunday.
Artery Art 5
