November 29, 30

 Well, we are two days from December.

So--another day and another cryptocurrency firm files for bankruptcy. 

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We are now one day from December. Some people already have their lights up and the stores have had Christmas merchandise up since Halloween. The seasonal ads touting all the junk people can spend their money on are all over the TV. So are the adds for Medicare Advantage plans. At least three times the same ad was played back to back to back. Yeah, three times in a row. We have become increasingly irritated by seeing the same ad either back to back or twice within the same commercial block.  I am getting to hate being sold to.

My reading and commenting was interrupted because Mom thought it would be a good idea to do our shopping yesterday. The supermarket where we do our usual shopping sends out some coupons that are actually useful targeting products we normally use. We didn't have much on our shopping list but used the coupons and took advantage of the sales for things we would use soon anyway. They had a nice sale on boneless, skinless chicken breasts at about half the regular price (or what has become regular price). I have to get them packaged for the freezer today. We also got some cabbage for a couple of favorite recipes. They also had turkey breasts. We haven't bought whole turkey for a long time because it is way too much for just Mom and me.

Blockfi was the crypto company I mentioned yesterday. I read early today that the company has filed law suits against FXT for deceptive business practices. Interesting note though: one short story mentioned that Blockfi has ties to mainstream finance companies which would send some tremors through out that industry.

November 24

 Happy Thanksgiving

Hope you all have a good holiday. For some years I have seen articles about achieving a "Work/life balance" or "work/family balance." Usually, I have read (some) and had a very familiar feeling: they didn't seem to know anything about the lives of people at my level of the economy--not quite the bottom. I just finished Robert Reich's Thanksgiving post and it is worth a read. I am glad he was able to make a choice in balancing his family and work he loved. He writes about people who love their work more than their family, love their family more than their work, or those who love both intensely. That's nice but most people I know don't love their but can't leave it or cut back on it because they have to provide for the family they do love. Worse all too often the work they do don't love doesn't even provide an adequate living for the family. 

Gizmodo provides the current "Oh, S$#t" moment. Add the Rio Verde Foothills community to the list of communities facing water crises.

I am not as ungrateful and curmudgeonly as you might think. We do have a lot to be grateful for. We are in reasonably good health. We live in an area that has pretty much escaped the weather disasters so many other places have experienced. The heat wasn't much more or longer than usual though we are grateful for the air-conditioning that made it bearable. We have been able to afford all of the food we need (and some treats we didn't but at our age who cares?) We could afford the gas to get us to and from where ever we had to go and our rent is still affordable for us. Hope we can say the same next Thanksgiving.

November 22

Sunny again today and should be a bit warmer. The snow is gone even from the north sides of the houses.

Oh, happy day. The Former Guy's Supreme Court decided the Senate can have his tax returns and other financial documents. They have been trying since 2019 to get the records to look into possible violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

A major rail worker's union rejected the recently negotiated contract which puts the whole thing in jeopardy. I have seen a large number of articles on the collapse of the agreement and its potential for causing economic damage but I really had to search to find out what caused the rejection. I think I remember the news stories ballyhooed the proposals for increased wages and hefty bonuses. What wasn't addressed were the working conditions and "quality of life" proposals the unions demanded. Obviously money doesn't buy everything.

November 11

Sunny but cool after a cold night. The snow on the southern sides of the houses but not on the northern side.

The elections aren't really over yet. We do know that the Democrats won the Senate with 50 + the Vice President to the Republican 49. One seat is still open with the runoff in Georgia scheduled for the 6th (I think) of December. The Republicans have won the House but by how much is still not known. The count last I heard was 219 Republicans to 212 for the Democrats with about 4 seats undecided. Both margins are very thin. But that isn't stopping Kevin McCarthy from acting like his leadership role has been decided. It hasn't. Several Republicans have said they won't vote for him--period. He has promised to kick Omar, Swalwell and Schiff off their committee. He may or may not get the opportunity. Tit for tat is so petty. 

November 18

 We finally got snow that stuck but not all that much and certainly not the 3+feet around Buffalo, N.Y. According to the weather forecasts we will have cold and snow through Monday and then will have more seasonal temperatures for the rest of the week.

We had medical appointments yesterday and today. And today, after meeting with Mom's new GP, we went shopping. Partly we had a list of thing we had run out of and then, considering the increasing food prices and the situation in the world generally, we decided to bulk up our pantry a bit. We had used our stash down for the last almost year but reversed course considering everything going on. All the prices are higher, sometimes much higher. We don't expect them to come down any time soon. Isn't it interesting that none of the Republicans are talking about inflation anymore. Instead it is all about investigating for any imaginary reason anyone with the name "Biden." 

Nancy Pelosi gracefully announced her intention to not run for a leadership position in her party. She will remain a member of the house representing her San Francisco district. What was totally graceless and spiteful was the Republican response. Most couldn't even be bothered to attend. Few applauded any part of her speech. And as soon as she finished they held a press conference promising to investigate everyone who opposed them, including Nancy Pelosi. The Former Guy isn't the only one imagining themselves to be "victimized."

The Behavioral Scientist has a good article on the difficulties trying to change societies and, although a primary focus is on changes that may affect our environmental footprint, can be applied to any major crisis. The author brings in the responses to 9/11 and to the various big oil spills as examples. I liked the discussion of two primary blocks to change: faith in market capitalism and faith in technological change.

I have one hope for the political situation over the next two years: Perhaps any attempts at impeachment of anyone will fail because there are half a dozen sane Republicans who will vote against. I can't imagine any Democrats would go along so handful of Republicans voting "no" would sink such crap.

November 16

Cold and cloudy. The snow didn't even stick around long enough to become a memory. The Weather Channel was talking about heavy snow for the southern shores of the Great Lakes and for the Finger Lakes area of New York thanks to the lake effect. They are talking about snow falls in feet not inches. We'll see.

Well, The Former Guy finally made his "big announcement." I don't know what time it was supposed to be on. I don't think the channels we watch carried it at all though they were all mentioning it this morning. At one point the commenter said that even Sean Hannity broke away from the ramblings. We now have non-stop election season.

I guess winter has decided to slip in. We are getting snow now with a brisk west wind. I don't think any will accumulate yet.

I wonder how soon TFG will have to foot his own legal bills. The RNC Chair McDaniels said the day before the election that if he did run they couldn't do that. She also said that on the day of the election. Will they actually cut him off.

The last time we went shopping we were stunned by some of the prices for what we bought. I wonder what those prices will be when we shop on Friday. Hopefully they will be nothing like some of those described here. 

John Michael Greer on Ecosophia has a post on education which makes points similar to those I have made over the last several years. The education industry was designed to turn out obedient, punctual, and sober workers for the factories. It wasn't designed to teach critical thinking or to encourage questioning of anything. He talks about reading and how children are ready to learn to read at different times. I had difficulty with reading when we started in 1st grade. Finally Mom got mad and taught me phonics which made the teachers mad. She wasn't a teacher and didn't have a college education so she wasn't qualified to teach me anything. Mom was polite, so she didn't give them the middle finger salute they deserved, and went on doing what she had been doing. I never looked back and became a voracious reader. Even today, in my 70s, I read around 200 books a year. That is considerably less than when I was a history grad student.

An interesting notion: charging a hefty tax on water intensive crops exported to other countries. The article does a nice job of covering some of the obvious problems with the scheme. I have another question: shouldn't information be considered as a "crop" considering how much water is used by the server farms in the west? And the author is absolutely right in wondering how in the world you can get a handle on the amount of water a given export requires. This site gives the water burden various foods require and Stanford University says each computer chip requires 10 gallons of water.

November 15

 Cold but sunny yesterday. As far as I can see (at 4:45am and well before the sun is up) we haven't had any snow either. Temperature is, at the moment, 32F and not expected to break 40F.

The news this morning provided a detail about The Former Guy's new court filing against the January 6 Committee and it was hilarious. The argument presented simply says that just because TFG claims certain documents he stole and moved to Mar-a-lago are "personal" they are and should be returned. Sounds a lot like Tricky Dick's argument that "because the President does it it is legal." I believe that went down in flames 50 years ago. For those who too young to remember or haven't read enough unredacted history that was President Richard M. Nixon who received a "get out of jail" card in the form of a pardon from President Gerald Ford who thought the nation should move on from Watergate and heal. I was of two minds on the question of the pardon when it was issued and as time has passed I am leaning more toward the conclusion that it was a mistake. We basically let Nixon off the legal hook for his alleged crimes and the wound only festered to give us TFG and the current mess.

Robert Reich has written a blog expressing a notion I have been thinking over the last couple of weeks: Elon Musk bought Twitter to destroy it. I can't believe a guy who is supposedly so smart couldn't foresee the result that would come when the famous blue check went on sale. Or that, given his disdain for curbing the violence and rabid lying on line, that political hate, misogyny, and violence would spike. But notice: Reich makes a connection to the FTX meltdown and Peter Thiel's attempt to purchase two senatorial seats (one failed and one succeeded.) I guess if you are big enough and/or rich enough you can cause all kinds of pain for people lower on the economic/power food chains than you and get away with it.

According to the U.N., sometime today the world's population will reach 8 billion. The article gives a lot more detail. However, I looked at the historical pattern wondering when we might expect 9 billion and found that the last few cycles of adding 1 billion (11 to 13 years) we can expect to reach that figure by 2035 and might reach 10 billion by 2050. Also note that the last ten years have had numerous wars and civil conflicts, at least two serious economic downturns, one serious disease pandemic and an "epidemic" of drug suicides often called "deaths of despair and world wide natural disasters. But that hasn't done much to curtail the growth of the growth of the human population.

Update: we have snow but nothing much is sticking. Intermittent high winds.