The Hayseeds blog, No. 49 for the week starting February 7, 2004.
January 24, 2004
Hayseeds No. 48
February 7, 2004
Hayseeds No. 49
February 14, 2004
Hayseeds No. 49
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guess what: 6 weeks more of winter or in upstate New York, 6 more decades of winter until May comes out, and the Tulips are out, and everything purty and warm again. I can feel fountain day already.
The Sundance has this to say about this: Punxsutawney Phil you suck! You don't know what it feels like when that 3°F gasoline gets poured your thortle body, and that cold slurry get's sprayed in your cylnders. That stuff is hard to burn
. I second that motion, Sundace, athough it feels a little different on my face, then it does in your throttle-body injectors.
They are predicting some big snowfall on Tuesday and Friday. I guess, although my mom says Wenesday is going to be a big mess too. Hopefully I'll make to work next weekend, and not be stopped by the snow (remember, I drive a Plymouth Sundance and not a Snowdance).
Some people in CNY wish it would stop snowing. Others as far west as Fulton are feeling the same way. Fulton, you know that town across the river from Fonda, has been as unlucky (or lucky depending who you are) to get almost 6 feet of snow in the past week. And they don't know where to dump all of it. We're talking about East of Utica, and West of Albany on Thruway/Mohawk, probably 45 minutes on the Thruway from Albany. The cold weather of there, has lead to a lot of lake effect snow in Western New York as Lake Erie just hasn't frozen this year yet, due to the way the weather is.
I'm tired of the cold. I'm almost ready to call for global warming, except then the summers will be more miserably hot which is bad, as there is more one can do in summer then the winter (although with the right gear and technology, the difference is smaller then one might think).
Of course if your a conspiracy theorist, and disagree with Mike Landin's claim that we are in the weather pattern of the 50s and early 60s, then you could blame this on Global Warming after all, Fulton's most snowest winter on record was in '95-'96 when they got a total of 275" or about 23 feet over the year.
our fuel economy is, when you think about it, 20 MPG highway is still pretty impressive. If your going along at 60 MPH, then your going a mile a minute. So in 20 minutes you'll go through a gallon of gasoline. And remember what an gallon is the same size as a plastic milk jug. That's not a lot of fuel, when you consider it's consuming roughly a 1/20th of a gallon every minute. A cup is 1/16th of a gallon and that's just a unit of measure. The tall glass of milk your drinking right now contains probably two cups. And figure the size and the power of the explosion that an engine must make. In the area of a single 2L soda bottle, a Neon pushes out roughly 130 horsepower, although certainly not that much at lower 30 MPGs. It moves along a metric ton of car all through controlled explosions in the size of a single soda bottle.
the fact we are driving cars with the biggest engines in nearly two decades or so some claim. There are more V-8s on the road then anytime since 1985. Much of this is our truck afficationary, but certainly 'utes and overpowered sport car popularity play a role. Cars are so redicolously overpowered nowdays. You don't need a 225 HP V-6 in your family sedan, just to go to the grocery store as a 100 HP Acclaim works perfectly fine. That said, gas milage is so good on contemporary cars, that the prior probably gets the same or better milage.
Compared to the cars of the 1960s, our vechicles are so overpowered. They accelerate so quickly, handle so much better, and have much more power, all at the same time consuming much less gas. Isn't technology great?
Along with cheap gas, that's why people are looking for more powerful cars. Turbocharging is a no-no, with the insurance costs it entails, eventhough it would save a lot on gas. You don't need a six banger at highway speeds. Insurance companies just hear the word turbo charger and feel dangerous. Obviously, GM's 4-6-8 engine might be a model, but that's kind of an expensive design and died because of emissions problems, but their 8-4 truck engine might work.
But all them ignore one of the biggest wasters of fuel (in my opinion), and that is traffic. We as a nation waste so much fuel idling, and that's in the non-existant traffic environment of Albany (well, except for the Slingerlands light where I often turn my engine off in the morning). It's particularly bad when your idling a big-block engine.
So I'm hopeful for a future of hybrids, and the great increases in fuel economy and decreases of air pollution are critical things in overcrowed highways in big cities. After all, it's the cities where these things are real problems. There are a lot more trees in the countryside to eat carbon dioxide, although not nearly enough to keep a balance with our fossil fuel consumption, as Cornell found out.
Fayette's continued battle to get heavy duty SUVs and pickup trucks off parkways and residential neighboors. No real surpises here. I think it's a good fight as the Hummer and the alike at 7' or 84" is too big to belong there. Most of them only have lanes that are 8' or 9' feet wide. If you can afford a Hummer, you can also afford a Dodge Shadow (only broke college students and rednecks drive those, after all) as a commuter car, or if you need more class, something a little bigger and newer. Car routes should be just for cars, not for big trucks. I think the banning of these big vechicles off parkways is an essential step to protecting our parkway system, but it probably won't happen, until it's too late.
although it looks to some as though as though the western Republicans may have the moral high point (although they are not much better then NE Democrats). The problem is IS-TEA mandates that part of it's money must be spent on mass-transit instead of highway use, and that the amount of money sent to a state currently factors in mass-transit spending with other highway spending.
This all from a gasoline tax, which would seem like it should be going to highway construction, instead of mass transit. Republicans in the west, who mostly want new highways for their new cities, find a lot of the gas tax money going from their states to old states (in the NE) with massive, expensive mass-transit systems.
So they propose states recieve money for highways, based on milage and amount of gas tax sent to the feds for each state. Which seems reasonable, except the Republicans have no plan to decouple mass-transit spending from highway funds.
Interstate highway mandates are a pain, but they are designed for consistency and fast transportation from coast to coast. If such mandates did not exist, interstate highways could offer things like walkways or trails in their median or other places, narrow car-only lanes, and dozens of other things. And just think how much states could save not having to write up all those variences when building new highways.
say about NXIVM, because they are an evil capitalist corporation and like to sue (see disclaimer below), I'll try to be as honest as possible, but you'll have to read between the lines, as lawyers can't do that legally. Folks, the story about Kristin Marie Snyder's brief time in NXIVM's Executive Success Program and subsiquent sucide is rather scary, especially figuring it's in our backyards. Let me quote her log notes, as featured in the TU:
"I attended a course called Executive Success Programs (a.k.a. Nexivm) based out of Anchorage, AK, and Albany, NY," she wrote. "I was brainwashed and my emotional center of the brain was killed/turned off. I still have feeling in my external skin, but my internal organs are rotting. Please contact my parents ... if you find me or this note. I am sorry life, I didn't know I was already dead. May we persist into the future."
On a second page she wrote "No need to search for my body."
It's easy to dismiss ESP as an extreme business school or a cult, not respresenative of any but it's own scary and strange culture that attempts to create succes in the business world, but I'm afraid it's problems are bigger then just that. For now, we will ignore Kristin's sexual preferences, even though they might have been relevant to her actions. I have bigger fishes to fry here.
Business is a quest of people to improve their prestidge, power, and property at the cost of other's freedoms It's little different from any other political insitution. I would go as far as argue that all businesses are political and ideological, although such goals are not admited). Business goes to great denial of just that, trying to wrap itself in instrumentalism and rationalist abstractions and denial of irrational forces like the political, the environment, and mass-society. It attempts to commodize everything, as any marxist would say. Business schools are freightening and confusing with all the instrumental reason that they attempt to instil into people, and at the same time create self denial, in an attempt to make people more business friendly.
It's okay to teach discipline and frameworks, as those provide us with the tools for success and give us greater clarity over the field where one might choose to work. But all too often, it goes farther then that. It attempts to indoctrine certain values, that might appear to be good for material success in the short run, but determental in the long run. And the end result of this supposted indoctrining of 'business' success:
Clifford's NXIVM bill was $11,500. She sold the couple's Tacoma truck to help pay it, as well as Kristin Snyder's $16,000 debt. She said NXIVM rejected her request for a partial refund for the second intensive course.
Well, I guess it's not the same as selling the family farm to pay for NXIVM, but it's still pretty bad. I'd probably have some real distaste for this cult after this, and it was the truck that she died in (and everybody loves Tacoma trucks ;).
Alan Knight's argument in the TU LtE that was published on Friday. It references a series of articles the TU ran about a few 'farmers' who reject modernity to a greater degree then others, by using 'old-time breeds' instead of modern technology for their farms.
Knight aruges that such articles use the moment to present their romanticism as reality and to get preachy about a kind of agriculture that can neither feed a hungry planet nor make a sustained profit for those who play with it.
Of course he would. He after all the associated director of sleeze-ball relations at the Capitol and Associate Director of Public Policy at the NYFB in Glenmont, across the street in the shinny buidling across from the shinny new Walmart supercenter.
I guess it's a question of meaning as attached to the farming. See the LOB and all it's NYFB posters on member offices as an demostration of the symbolic value of this word, even if beyond it's symbol is a bunch of trombling around in cow dung, poverty, mixed with a lot of harshness and beauty of nature and the irrational world around us.
In others the existential nature of farming versus rural/suburban resident with garden/animals/big backyard. We all know the census/USDA defination of a farm, and it's defictiencies. Obviously all NYFB cares about is it's paying members, although many of us benifit from it's extranalities produced by it's capital presence, to saying nothing about agriculture as an insitution.
At any rate, farming has always found it's self in a precarious position, since the growth of industrialization and much later the technological revolution. It is an insitution representing the 'idiocy of rural life' and purposeful and planned inefficency. Certainly people have embraced all kinds of technology to make agriculture more successful in modern society, and with all technologies there have been pros and cons. Yet, the instrumentalization of agriculture has lead into fundamental preversions of the land, humankind, and animals. Only when humankind comes up with a rational solution broader then instrumental solutions to fixing farms and our many other problems will things get truly better.
, but I think I'll be able to get out of my driveway and to school with no problem today without snowblowing. I have a busy day coming up, including along with a busy week. Got the Music Quiz today, plus I need to write the 250-word essay portion of the essay. I have a 3 1/2 hour break to do all that great work. The Computer Science 2/CSI310 project is coming along. I have most of the game class done, and most of the work is now in debugging, finishing up a few of the stubs, and writing the driver.
Kerry is continuing to roll on, and Edwards won South Carolina big time, and is neck-to-neck with Clark in Oklahoma (although many have called it for Clark). Lieberman is toast, and I'm guessing Shelly isn't happy.
It's exciting. However, the race ain't over yet and the more I hear about Edwards the more I'm thinking he'd be a great candidate for the Democrats to run for President or at least Vice President (which he is very likely to win either title). How can one argue that there wouldn't be a better ticket then a southern-talkin' democrat that has the great looks of RFK who cares about the poor, rural issues, and manufacturing and agricultural economies, with an urbane democrat who is a Washington hack who knows his stuff, and hails from a liberal New England.
Edwards has a lot of steam left in him (even if he's only one or two states so far), and if money is an indicator, Edwards is the winner in Texas, outstripping all the other Democratic candidates, in the second most populous state in the nation. He raised $1.6 million dollars in Texas during the past quarter, more then 2.5x that of Dean and 3x that of Clark. Kerry had insignificant contributions in Texas.
Of course we know what a warm reception the Texans gave John F. Kennedy, the last Eastern Establishment democrat to visit Texas in 1963. Besides Lee Harvey Oswald shooting him, many people in the crowds really disliked him (the JFK-LBJ ticket was in severe danger of losing Texas in '64 which would have been a grave loss). Somehow I see the saming being true with Kerry in Texas, especially because the way things are now, Texans are rediscovering their idenities in a changing world. Winning a majority of the delegates in Texas would certanily put Edwards neck-to-neck with Kerry, or maybe even put him over the top. But a Edwards-Kerry or Kerry-Edwards team will be great. This is going to be an exciting race...
friends: don't sweat, the big whole is $1 billion less then predicted. Bruno says that he'll be the good cop again this year, and ensure that those nasty fee hikes will be less nasty, at least in theory, just make the lower classes pay the most because it's more fun to milk the poor.
And County Executives are still complaining to the guv about Medicaid expenses, and the governor promises to do something for them, but as the County Executives note, his plan won't do much.
Figures. Remember I was planning on voting for Pataki, but I decided he was going to win anyways, so I tossed it on Golisano, as I thought it would be funny if he came in second, and made the Democrats the "Row C" party, in a state dominated by Democrats. ;) Sigh. Pataki has screwed over New Yorkers the past two years with his terrible budgets, of course the tough fiscal times haven't been on his side, but his budgets are just bad policy.
veto the highway spending bill that congress is sending to him.
At $318 billion dollars, it's pretty cheap compared to the defense budget, ringing in at $401 billion. And highway spending does something useful for us, a bad highway may break many tie rods or take many many of lifes, but defense spending isn't likely to effect most of us. Not to mention, highway spending promotes economic growth, and keeps our boys in the community, doing something that will benifit us all, which I don't think defense will do. I've previously discussed the problems with IS-TEA, see the archives.
a lot to say about the governor's budget and the high balling of the issue. The good news is he got into the news, the bad news is he's raising the fee like crazy, and he's literally putting pennies into actual trail spending.
It's better then nothing though, I guess. But the fund expires next year, and the fee probably won't, so it's a problem, and I have my doubts that Assm. Morrelle, the ATV mavrick in Assembly won't go for it, or the ATV lobby. Maybe with a lower fee, and more money spent on building trails will happen in the budget, if NYSORVA and allies can get their collective butts in proper action.
Peter Cameron had this to say about this:
More than 30 years ago, naturalist Roderick Nash warned us of the dangers of overusage in the wilderness. ATVs only add to that danger.
I must say though that there is room for some type of compromise. Some terrain can better handle ATVs than others. We must allow riders an opportunity to ride. Paying a yearly fee to operate an ATV is only part of the big picture. We must respect the fragile balance of nature. Both are possible as long as we work at it.
Which is true, overuse is a problem all over the place, be it hiking trails in the Catskills, or ATV trails in some areas. But we have a lot of rural land, and if we spread out riders properly and build trails in sensible places, and ignore the mud puddles (building hiking trails on the side, etc.), these things can be done
, as in the words of the Late Governor Rockefeller.
a farm has sold the development rights to their land, one of the first farms to do this in Eastern Upstate New York. Which is cool to see the product expanding, and keeping developer's paws off this land in Schaghticoke, which was a few inches away from coming another boring old strip mall. And if the state can just keep this program funded, and assure adquate access to this program, at least some areas will be kept natural, rural, and not controlled by big business.
storms, boneheads, tests, studying, coding for CSI 310, and now I'm calling it quits for a couple of hours (after all it's a Friday evening). We all need to relax from time to time, and blogging seems to be one way for me to relax. This is, after staring at a fullscreen NiftyTelnet window telneted into itsunix.albany.edu running emacs (with split screen mode of course) for three hours.
It's good to use both sides of the brain, the instrumentalism of the left side is really corrosive on oneself, it's fun to live in a world of fanasty and fun of the right brain (the real world, unlike the left).
All I can say is coding is particularly hard, especially for me, with all the bugs I seem to put in it, not to mention a even bigger waste of time: misstarts in the form of misread instructions or poor implemenations of things. But I'll try to put the effort in, and get a good grade in CSI 310. Speaking of tests and grades, the two I had this week went okay, although I'm not fully pleased with my work on the American Music test (I blanked out: stupid cramming for two hours before the exam). Then again, I have high standards, and a 'A' or a 'B' is what I expect. However, this is SUNYland, the place of social promotion if you suck up to the prof enough, so in the end, I'll do okay.
, but I still got to go home early today, as SUNY dismissed at 12:20 PM (I got my test at my 10:10 class) and my parents got out of work early, as they found a bunch of bones in the work site next to my parents. I have to admit that's a little bit strange, but not all that werid, we are talking about the south end. A bunch of bones, probably from 20 years ago, sitting in a 55 gallon drum.
Which had to of course remind me about those rather strange discussions of the high school days of yesterday, about burning bodies (human primarly but probably spawned by animal), by soaking the body in kersone or diesel in a barrel, and setting on fire, suppostly the fat at a certain buring point will cause it to combust. Of course, I always like playing with fire (and was having fun on Thursday doing just that) , but burning bodies is admitly a bit on the strange side of things, not that this probably has anything to do with the southside bones.
Back to the snow that wasn't. The secondary roads around here weren't great, but the great ice storm never happened. It was actually warmer out here in the country, then in the big city (of Albany). Snow and then sleet stopped pretty early in the morning. No surpise there though. The weather people always get over excitied about the weather, and predict things that aren't really there / going to happen.
the NYT on the new USDA regs relating to the feeding of cattle and calfs, I'm not at all surpised, concerned, or worried, although that might have been the attention to the author. The article noted that on many (larger) farms calves have been fed cow's blood instead of milk, and cattle feed has been allowed to contain composted wastes from chicken coops, including feathers, spilled feed and even feces.
So what's wrong with that, once you get over the well, ew factor?
We aren't exactly feeding cows hazardous waste per se. I'd be more concerned if we were feeding them human blood, rather then blood of slaughter cows, raised in a controlled environment, where we know what we put in them and what will come out. There are probably some cows out there doing illegal IV drugs that they bought off of Green Street in Albany, but they are far more of a minority then the human kind. For the most part we control what we put in.
Like it or not, agriculture is a highly competitive business (take Economics I and II if you missed those lectures), and whatever works and keeps people in the business is okay. I know, I'm being facious which such instrumentalism, but you get my point. It's better to reuse and recycle then to waste things, especially if they are wasting profit (see my previous January entry on pure pleasure, plug power, etc...). Calves started on drugs and slaughterhouse remains like blood are a more effective use of resources then using milk. Likewise, using composted wastes as a feed is a good thing, as it puts former waste into use.
In theory this all means less land has to be wasted, more efficency, and better products, but as all theories are, such notions may be negated by certain tedencies in our world. Of course, one might refer to NYFB's Alan Keysos's argument on agricultural sustainability in his TU LoE I discussed the other day.
or at least mad states, it seems like our President's plan to revamp new source review is getting the thumbs down. 27 governors say that NSR will lead to greater pollution to their states, 5 don't know, and 12 think it will improve matters.
Tweaking rules is difficult, and Dubya, Inc's motives are rather suspect. However, the NSR rules are obviously not working in their current set up, and we aren't getting the plants of the pre-60s offline and replaced with modern plants with modern pollution control. So we have dangerous, polluting, warn out technology, whose only cost efficent/pratical solution is to replace them to meet current standards, but that's absurbly expensive in the same case, so the old continues to go on, bleeching out pollution levels of the 60s.
The President's attempt to revise these rules seems to have some dangerous problems, such as they don't clearly seem to prevent 'upgraded' plants with reduced pollution from actually producing more pollution. I don't know I'm confused. I think both the President and environmentalists are lying to us on this issue.
the President's plan to have us all driving hydrogen cars by '20 really us. All the problems I've previously mentioned with them are noted in the report. The cost of fuel cells that pack enough power to move a car (ie. greater 200 HP, which is what people currently demand and technology requires), the problems of storing hydrogen safely, and the problem of mass-production of hydrogen / energy.
They're advocating for a more pragmatic solution, namely to promote cleaner power plants, hybrid-power trains, and the alike. The first is costly (as previously noted), and the second is happening, but it's going to take some time, you can't just reinvent the powertrain of the whole vechicle fleet overnight. We are talking about 150 years of engineering and refindment, which would get dramatically changed. Testing is expensive, as is all that refinment to machining, and the costs of retraining automechanics and factory workers.
basically a done deal in Massachussets. Just think of the tourism ads: welcome you and your lover to the state of the fag. It's going to be difficult if not impossible to modify the Massachussets consitution to prohibit gay mariage, as such a modification requires voter approval of the admendment, by voters of one of the most liberal states out there (hah). Obviously, other states will have to honor such marriages as the US consitution says that. A US consitutional admendment to ban gay marriage will be difficult, as it requires 3/4 of states to raditify. That's not to mention it's a bad idea. The admendment prohibits a specific freedom, something different from other ones that give certain freedoms.
news much lately, but he has a condemination of sorts of Fred LeBrun's article.
Fred LeBrun's Jan. 30 column, "An agenda hides behind handgun fee," does a nice job of telling part of the story by relaying to readers that Gov. George Pataki's budget proposal contains certain fee increases for handgun permit applications, renewals, amendments, transfers, as well as for gunsmiths and dealers.
However, he fails to point out that eight counties already require renewal of handgun permits. Permit renewal every five years is a helpful tool that keeps gun owners accountable for their weapons.
Yes, in New York City and other downstate counties, but things are different there. Still this doesn't address the real issue: the trojan nature of this proposal in the governor's budget.
