We had heavy rain yesterday afternoon. I decided to take a day off working on putting the gardens in shape. I am rethinking my plans to put in tomatoes and peppers. They are warm weather plants but they don't like really hot weather and I am getting a feeling that we will have some of those over 95F days sooner rather than later and more of them. We'll see if my feelings are any more accurate than some of the weather forecasts. It is cloudy, cool and wet. We had the windows open a crack and the patio open a bit but the temperature in the house dropped enough that the furnace came on. The cats are not happy because I closed everything up.
California is still water logged from the series of atmospheric rivers that came through over the last month or so. And the snowpack has just begun to melt. During the broadcast version of this story provided a term that seems appropriate for our times: weather whiplash.
CNN posted this article which has an interesting title. Why interesting? Because it is rare that anyone says anything about "limits" in our society. We don't like limits whether in our military/diplomatic efforts or in our personal ambitions or in our economic models. The term "big box store" was invented for Walmart and made a lot of sense in the rural and suburban environment where people found it far more convenient to go to a single large store to get what they needed rather than to several small stores scattered over a wide area. But there was always a cost for the people living nearby. I saw critical studies forty years ago which showed that a Walmart in one county sucked jobs and economic activity out of surrounding counties. The lost jobs outnumbered the jobs Walmart created. And the profits went to the corporate headquarters. And the local governments lost tax revenue as small businesses closed. And as those small business owners disappeared the local charitable and civic organizations shriveled.
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