Campsite Along Reservior
Long Pond Mountain
Shots – Health News : NPR
Dirty Life
Dirty Life!
Walking around the Rodgers Center, or basically any rural dairy country in Upstate NY you can’t help but notice the smell of silage, the mud and manure, the rundown barns and old and decrepit farm homes. Good ol dairy country can be pungent depending on the time of year.
With work, I’ve also had the opportunity to travel to New York City and Coney Island and canvassed public housing buildings in the city. They’re often quite diapilated and in rough shape, dirty grimy buildings with enormous piles of garbage.
Suburbia likes to hide the mud and manure that makes the world go round. It’s a plastic world, the suburbs buy food wrapped in plastic far away from the smells of the farm and buried in a distant garbage dump. Let the working folk deal with the smells and dirt of the real world. But denialism doesn’t make it disappear.
Poverty and the debris that makes up our world is often seen as something to look down at, almost sub human. Those dirty tenements and farms. But it’s a lot closer to reality than the suburbanite would want to admit. Cows and diesel tractors, are real life. As the piles of garbage that sit outside of the blighted buildings in the city. We all consume natural resources and we all generate waste – it’s all part of who we are as a species. Even though the suburbanite is in denial.
The Back to the Office Maximum – Culture Study
In the United States, organizations where employees have been largely working from home for the past 16 months are having a mild freak-out. Depending on the organization, they’re hemming and hawing. They’re treading water. They’re having seemingly endless meetings with HR. They’re analyzing focus group data and surveys, and drafting carefully worded “back to the office” plans. And they’re dealing with or anticipating or totally ignoring employee blowback.
In service of the Big Green Lie 🌎 🌲💚 🤥
In service of the Big Green Lie 🌎 🌲💚 🤥
It really bothers me to see that they are developing the big farm fields off of Stoner Trail in Johnstown into industrial solar energy facilities. It seems like one of the fastest growing forms of sprawl these days are the mega industrial solar farms which honestly don’t even produce that much energy compared to existing fossil plants which crank out far more energy with far lower environmental and land impacts. Probably a 5 megawatt solar farm sprawled over dozens acres of land compared to the 750 MW gas power plants a few miles down the road.
I think the obsession over climate change has gotten way out of hand, and while we should take reasonable steps to conserve energy and produce it efficiently and cleanly, on the whole nothing really beats fossil energy when it comes to clean, reliable, low environmental impact sources of energy. Roof top solar power and wind power in appropiate locations can be part of the solution but we also need to realistic about the impacts of all sources of energy.
I think we need to get away from the denialism of climate change won’t be inevitable by the left. All the evidence says it will be a serious problem that will hurt real people. But we also need energy to power society – natural gas, oil and coal aren’t going away – despite the denialism that these industrial solar and wind farms represent. Society has to make unpleasant choices and we are going to warm the planet and cause all kinds of pain by doing that but a lot of it is inevitable. But we can choose to protect our environment and our land, by choosing cleaner fossil fuel plants with better pollution controls over these industrial solar and wind farms.
The battery relay – exciter wire is working again on my truck
The battery relay – exciter wire is working again on my truck. 🔋
Took five minutes to fix. I apparently used copper coated aluminum wire to run the exciter wire. Salt, water air got into one of the butt connectors, dissolved the wire. While I should replace the wire, I instead just stripped it back and fixed the bum connection. If I ever do any more automotive wiring I’ll follow the advice of the experts and not ever use CCA wire, it’s bad news. I am not surprised, I made this mistake previously and had this issue. CCA is much cheaper than copper but it’s one headache after another.