I just spent two hours out in the 90° sun detaching and reattaching my hay mower to the Little John, a 3 cylinder Japanese compact John Deere tractor. 3 point hitch. 5 foot mower.
I'm not done, but I had pushed myself so close to heat injury that I had to come in.
2. I've been in about ten minutes, shirt off, A/C on, standing under a ceiling fan on medium.
I'm still producing new sweat. Haven't shed my excess heat energy yet. Getting closer.
"Easy" 3 point hitch tractor technology.
3. Here's the first half of hitching a team to a wheeled load. This is a cart, but a mower hitches exactly the same.
4. Here's the second half. Green broke team. If they were solid broke this would be easier.
5. When I moved to the country, the first thing I did was buy a small old 3 point hitch tractor. Then a slightly larger, slightly less old, 3 point hitch tractor. In about 4 years I bought an old team of Amish work horses.
And I said, "Holy shit! Nobody ever told me how easy!"
6. And these were big-ass horses. Donkeys are way easier. (1989. Me. Amanda and Sherry. Sherry nearer to viewer. Amanda in the furrow.)
7. If you look at farms, even small farms, you'll notice they tend to have one tractor per regularly used implement. It's such a pain in the ass to switch them around over time people just buy dedicated tractors. I almost never switch out this mower.
I can switch a team in 2 mins
8. Everything about high energy machines forces large scale production on the user. Lots of wasted space just for machines and turnaround room. Everything about animal power encourages productive use of every square meter.
I'll be so happy if I can get donkey mowers. Good chance
9. The reason I had to do all this crap today was because I had the mower installed in a poor configuration, which wasted energy and worsened final product.
It's not done yet, but enough that I can finish after the shade covers the tractor but before dark.
The other way...
Part 2:1 Evening sun puts this work area in the shade. Where I had the tractor.
2:2. Finished up putting the chains on and hooking up the PTO (drive) shaft. Hooked the hydraulics back up. All done.
2:3. Went out and mowed two passes of hay. 5' knife, 10 feet down. That will rake into one windrow, about 3 cart loads. I can pick that up with the girls in an hour, hour and a half. It'll feed them a week or ten days. How I do it. A little, steady, as I goes along.
2:4. Tractorland. North side of barn. Donks on south side, hay inside and on south side.
Both of those tractors are outfitted for jobs the donkeys could do. A little slower, but not a deal breaker.
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When I post about my intention to vote for Vice President Harris for President this election, I get one of 3 basic packaged responses.
1: Don't you care about genocide?
2: Good work, so am I, For The Climate!
3: How can you support a Big Party Professional Politician candidate?
2. Yes, I care about genocide.
There is no remotely electable candidate who will do jack shit about it.
I regret that. Deeply.
I feel that we are currently supporting the most brutal, aggressive, murderous regime and nation, except maybe Russia, in the developed world. Israel.
3. This week I have had people try to convince me that Don Old Trump is a "peace" candidate.
Har har.
Don Old Trump is a puppet candidate. If Putin wants us to stop supporting Israel Tmurp might, but that's no reason to elect him.
We'll be killing somebody. We always do. NMF.
So, on the one hand we've got this.
On the other hand we have demands to fix the roads.
Which takes, regardless of what somebody may have told you, lots of time, lots of fossil fuels, and lots of concrete.
2. It is a simple fact that building the interstate and other highways, building the cars which ran on them, and running said cars on said highways, were all major contributors to global heating and the resultant extreme weather events
Building them back will make it worse faster
3. We have a swath across the southeastern US where segments of that concrete, high speed infrastructure are gone.
Meanwhile, in the western US, we have so many wild donkeys that we're killing them for the cattle.
Unlike many wild horses, wild donkeys are trainable.
I've done it.
Leon wants me to get very fried.
Or berry dyed.
Or something. Comes with a blue dot with a white check in it, almost universally known as a "blue check."
Which when you think about how much more interested America is with speed than quality, makes sense.
2. I was verified for a year, not the old real verified, I asked but Twitter said I was a nobody and not worth verifying.
Which, to be fair, wasn't a view unique to them.
But Leon doesn't give two hoots about facts, in fact, facts fuck up his system and are to be deprecated.
3. I didn't get verified because I wanted to be Verified and have a Blue Check. I got verified because I was in an extensive DM conversation, and unless you're verified you can only have X number of DMs per month, and I had exceeded that and felt the need to continue.
So I bribed
1: Unlike most doomers, I believe that we could, if we chose, take specific actions which would reduce the level of ecosystem degradation we do, and in fact we could, over roughly a decade, move from degradation to improvement.
Sadly, this is a distinction without a difference,
2. because there is no societal interest in taking any productive actions.
If we want to reduce emissions, the way to do so is to burn less fossil fuels.
There is no other way.
If we want to reduce non-emissions ecosystem degradation, the way is to reduce mining, paving, cutting.
3. If we want to reduce toxic pollution, the way is to produce less toxins.
If we want to reduce plastic pollution, the way is to produce less plastic.
If we want to reduce PFAS pollution, the way is to produce less PFAS.
I used to write about climate change. I went about 5 years, writing a thread at least 5 days a week.
Although the global ecosystem is massively degraded and losing functions, I believe it still would act towards a restoration of a livable climate for the current biosphere if.
2. If, that is, we would let it.
If we would quit degrading it.
Yes, I am aware that there are over 8 billion of us. As it is today, roughly two billion of us extract and reduce to trash at least 8 to 10 times more resources per unit of time, per person, than the other 6 billion.
3. We have all these excuses. People would starve if they couldn't get from zero to 60 mph in under ten seconds, people would starve if we couldn't commute by personal jet, a thousand miles one way.
It's all bullshit.
The other 6 billion aren't starving. Lots of them are hungry,
So ...
What have I been doing in the earth shattered heat wave?
I bought a new guitar. New to me. Made in 1956. It's a ten string non-pedal steel guitar, and the most fascinating instrument I've ever encountered.
2. I'm consuming resources to operate it.
It's electric.
I have an 8 watt (maximum) Boss Katana Mini amplifier which runs on 6 AA batteries. My Peterson tuner is lithium ion rechargeable.
As kilowatts go it's a fairly low end consumer, but it's all energy.
4. This thing was designed by a man named Elbern H. Alkire, known professionally as Eddie.
Eddie's objective was to create a non-pedal steel guitar which addressed the same playability issues that pedal steels were invented for.
The Alkire Eharp was Betamax to pedal steel's VHS.