That video I shared earlier about the ex-Amish is interesting. 🤔
I really didn’t know much about the culture or the diversity of the Amish. Some even use small solar power at least to a limited extent to power lighting and other devices in their homes. Certainly Amish have used gas powered saws and propane refrigeration especially on dairies.
It’s actually an interesting discussion on what should be the role of technology in our lives. I’ve certainly never owned one of those big screen televisions and I’m interested in living a more simple life, especially when some day I have my off-grid property. I want to learn more.
“Central banks know what they are doing—basically lowering the return of safe assets to increase demand for risky ones. Once you do that, you know a bubble might appear, but the cost of not doing anything is probably even higher”
OK got lucky by hitting the contentious presidential election jackpot. During the 1840 election the "oll korrect" OK merged with Martin van Buren's nickname, Old Kinderhook, when some van Buren supporters formed the O.K. Club. After the club got into a few tussles with Harrison supporters, OK got mixed up with slandering and sloganeering. It meant out of kash, out of karacter, orful katastrophe, orfully confused, all kwarrelling or any other apt phrase a pundit could come up with. It also got mixed up with the popular pastime of making fun of van Buren's predecessor, Andrew Jackson, for his poor spelling. One paper published a half-serious claim that OK originated with Jackson using it as a mark for "all correct" (ole kurrek) on papers he had inspected.
OK was the "misunderestimated," "refudiated," and "binders full of women" of its day, and it may have ended up with the same transitory fate if not for the fact that at the very same time, the telegraph was coming into use, and OK was there, a handy abbreviation, ready to be of service. By the 1870s it had become the standard way for telegraph operators to acknowledge receiving a transmission, and it was well on its way to becoming the greatest American word.
His pain was transfixing, a case study in a fundamental climate riddle: How do you confront the truth of climate change when the very act of letting it in risked toppling your sanity? There is too much grief, too much suffering to bear. So we intellectualize. We rationalize. And too often, without even allowing ourselves to know we’re doing it, we turn away. At virtually every level — personal, political, policy, corporate — we repeat this pattern. We fail, or don’t even try, to rise to the challenge. Yes, there are the behemoth forces of power and money reinforcing the status quo. But even those of us who firmly believe we care very often fail to translate that caring into much action. We make polite, perhaps even impassioned conversation. We say smart climate things in the boardroom or classroom or kitchen or on the campaign trail. And then … there’s a gap, a great nothingness and inertia. What happens if a human — or to be precise, a climate scientist, both privileged and cursed to understand the depth of the problem — lets the full catastrophe in?
Why worry about the smell of the burning brakes on the steep hill as the truck only speeds up, when you got Sam Cooke's Twisting the Night Away, on the radio. Everybody, let's singing along ...
They're twistin', twistin' Everybody's feelin' great They're twistin', twistin' They're twistin' the night away
My apartment has these awful, worn out carpets that require vacuuming and are always getting muddy and dirty. The mud is hard to get out of them, and while I try not to track mud indoors, it happens. I always have trouble with the vaccum cleaner plugging up and even with occasional vacuums things are always dirty.
I can’t imagine ever having carpets when I have my off grid property. They just get so dirty and difficult to clean. I was fiddling around with the one again plugged up vacuum, swearing at myself and wishing I could just have vinyl or hardwood flooring in my cheap apartment that was easy to clean.
Or better yet, a gutter track like they have in tie stall barns to haul manure and waste bedding out to the manure spreader and apply to the land. It would be so nice if you could just sweep all the spilled food, the mud and muck to a track that would haul it out out to a bucket you could dump into your burning barrel. Not have to deal with not getting all the crap swept into a broom pan and dumped in the trash. Or even without a track but just a gutter, it would be a shit ton easier to clean.
I know that’s kind of a fantasy as I don’t live in a barn and the same kind of laziness I denounced with hot water heaters yesterday. And it’s not like I produce 12 tons of waste a year to manage. But I certainly hate carpeted floors and my forever jamming vacuum. I’d rather just sweep and was them, take out the trash and burn it and be done. None of this softy urbanites shit with their carpeting and automatic Roombas.
President Biden on Monday pledged to replace vehicles owned by the federal government with U.S.-made electric vehicles, doubling down on a similar campaign pledge.
“The federal government also owns an enormous fleet of vehicles which we're going to replace with clean, electric vehicles made right here in America by American workers,” he said while?discussing an executive order?aimed at increasing federal procurement of products made in the U.S.