Rift Hill
Great colors on Rift Hill!
Friday September 25, 2020 — Speculator, NY
Dusk comes early in September
But it still was really quite nice camping at Powley Place, the first time I've done it in a number of years.
Sunday September 19, 2021 — Ferris Lake Wild Forest — Crystal Lake And Glasgow Creek Trails 🗺 — Dexter Lake Trail 🗺 — Jerseyfield Lake Road Campsites 🗺 — Jerseyfield Road Campsites 🗺 — Spectacle Lake 🗺 — Spectacle Lake Trail 🗺 — Third Lake Trail 🗺— PDF with All Maps 📚
Pennsylvania’s largest native fruit is ripe now, for just a few days – pennlive.com
If you have a hankering for pawpaw – if you don’t, you’re in the majority who know little about the forgotten fruit – now is the time to head “way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.”
Pawpaws are the largest and most tropical fruit growing wild as a native tree in Pennsylvania. Each oblong fruit measures 3-5 inches long and weighs 6-12 ounces, with a light green skin with increasing black blemishes as it ripens.
The flesh of the ripe fruit, which is ripe for only a few days in mid- to late September and not palatable when it’s not ripe, has a unique flavor that’s described with comparisons to many other fruits and combinations of fruits but often note hints of banana, mango and pineapple.
Path
The High Price of Cheap Buildings
Earlier this summer, the 12-story Champlain Towers South beachfront condo collapsed in Surfside, Florida. The final death tally stands at 98 people, making it the fourth-deadliest structural failure in American history. While the engineers paraded into press conferences and experts brought onto news channels are quick to dismiss this collapse as an outlier, it is important to ask what forces are at play here, and to wonder if this is a foreshadowing of what is to come. Perhaps this is what happens when we build for economic—instead of human—purposes.
It is no revolutionary claim to say that we find ourselves in an age of consumerism. While it is not the subject of this piece to dive into the abstract economic discussion of free-market versus consumer capitalism, one can look around and quickly come to the conclusion that economic decisions today are usually predicated on desire, not need. In other words, modern American capitalism is governed not by production, but by consumption. How is this done? By planning obsolescence.
In 1932, a real estate broker named Bernard London wrote a now-famous essay entitled "Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence". In it, he outlines a solution to the Great Depression: government-mandated lifespans of consumer products and hefty taxes levied on “continued use of what is legally ‘dead’ ”. While this sounds draconian (I encourage a reading of the entire essay), much of what London was proposing is now standard practice. What was the “solution” for the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic? At least two stimulus checks, with some folks receiving as many as four. In both cases, the purpose is to incentivize consumption; to have the nation spend its way out of an economic downturn. This is because our economic system has a need for liquidity, the ability to easily convert assets into cash. Planned obsolescence generates these desired economic transactions, which can result in lots of growth. But the problem with this growth is that it comes at the cost of long-term prosperity.