Anyone can confirm a few months ago how I tinkered with converting an ordinary socket with a filament to an LED configuration. I lacked the skill but the concept was spot on, as shown by this item on the shelf today at Autozone. It is an LED light that fits in the old style twist socket. They sell for $17 per pair, which is about right for the parts and labor involved. Once again, the point here is that I was beat to the punch by only a matter of weeks or hours, and the margin is getting better all the time. It just takes one hit.
We are being election barraged again, proving Americans have still not smelled the coffee. All the parties are for themselves, polarized to self-enrichment by abusing the system. But one faction I don’t identify with are what the media calls “Liberals”. Take for instance that commercial with the college grad who complains he had to move back in with his parents. This typifies those who want things to go back like they were, with garbage men making $80,000 per year. It will never happen, that artificial demand is what brought us to ruin. They don’t specify what the grad majored in, get my meaning?For a fictionalized account, the “Titanic” book shows an immense amount of research by the author. My favorite chapter concerns a discussion on economics by the first class passengers. First class isn’t the same as rich in the sense that those who run a business have to know the trade and be there. The rich don’t. The conversation is full of chops at the American system. What impressed me is that, unknown to the author, if the word “corporation” was substituted for his personalities like Morgan, Carnegie, and Astor, a present-day account would read the same.
It is a lively debate about how those with responsibility have no power; those with power have no responsibility. One analogy said it was akin to the Titanic being steered not by the captain, but by the interests of the richest passengers on board. There is even a discussion of how much the government should be doing that is shockingly relevant to the situation now. The book puts it that the government should “not kill the thoroughbreds, just break them in”. The concept of foreign aid as wasted money is stated. However, the book has many intervening chapters of ho-hum. Unless it drastically picks up, it gets a B-.
What have we here? Look at the hits on my Water Tower video. Alas, thanks to Google I can’t post it here, but look on youTube. I hope they aren’t still nasty about me naming my videos “viral” and “most viewed” because it just isn’t possible I was the first and only person to do that. Anyway, search youTube for [veryatlantic water towers] and let’s see what all the fuss is about. Maybe it really is viral, but what are the odds of that? Later, Google (the operator behind this blog) made it incredibly difficult to upload my video and youTube didn’t help. Try Tower.
The first day of tourist weather for the season. The Canadians will begin arriving any day now. The big question is where I park once they do, as the pathway to my back yard isn’t quite wide enough for the sidecar. I’ll work that out later. Maybe get rid of that planter along the east wall. (I spoke too soon in the day, it was muggy hot again by mid-afternoon.) That put me in a mood to issue a warning about Microsoft. I say they should stick to fixing their own bad software and let the authorities do the copyright enforcing.
Trivia. Don’t go farming. When I read that combines are used only thirty days per year by the average farmer, I looked into the business to see how they afforded it. Turns out the machine is designed to last only ten years despite this casual demand. But it does the work of a thousand men, so there’s your answer. That also explains why my family’s idea about me doing farm labor was totally insane.
In the end, the farm [that I labored on] never produced a single cow, chicken, or bushel of anything. By 1960, farming was mechanized, except for ours. There were marginal homesteading areas churning out cash crops but the concept of the traditional farm was already long gone. That applies to that pseudo-romantic ideal of the self-sufficient family who milked cows and went to town once a year. Any connection between traditional farming and a good education was awfully weak long before I arrived.
The last upsurge in productivity was not through better seeds and fertilizer, but fossil fuel. That’s correct, gas and diesel. Before tractors, land was needed to grow food for all those horses. But start selling farmers machinery on credit and suddenly there’s a hundred million acres opened up for growing people food. That’s a lot of competition to anyone with crazy ideas of starting up a farm after the war.
Will farming change? It has to. It can’t get bigger, so it must get smaller. But I can’t see a return to family farmsteads with greenhouses. It is too labor-intensive unless tended by robots. Ah-ha, so you spotted the connection. There would have to be swarms of robots which’d have to be a lot cheaper than combines. And that’s in the short run. The agribusiness boys aren’t going to stand by and applaud this, you know.
What does farming mean to me? Nothing. Thanks to farming, I’m the only person you’ll ever know who stood in a ditch wearing old clothes and hitchhiked to university. I was still wearing those clothes at 21. Despite those precious teenage years I put in laboring on that farm, my parents never paid me one penny of what they promised.
They once, years later, sent me twenty dollars, but it was not for school. The disaster is that they had made the school promise repeatedly and that prevented me from establishing alternatives. (My performance proves this is not conjecture; that I would beyond doubt have planned differently if I’d known my parents were liars. Obviously, to be tripped up so badly and so permanently, I necessarily had to have been completely duped by those I most trusted.) I did not break even until nearly fifteen years later. That, too, had consequences for me. Like no wife and kids, for openers.
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