For this year’s growing season, I started on our oldest raised bed yesterday. In retrospect, given the weather we’ve had, I could have done so a week or ten days ago. But this is Minnesota and we do have late frosts some years so better safe than sorry. I’ve finally given up on the center 12 square feet of this 4'x8' bed. It’s such a literal pain reaching down and in to weed or harvest. So letting mulch take over there.
So far I’ve planted four heirloom tomatoes (two each of Caspian Pink and Pineapple) in the back and two sweet basil on the left, both as herbs and as companion plants to the asparagus I’ll plant between them today. Companion plants because deer don’t like basil and this raised bed is on the south side of our house so not behind a fence with a 60-pound Labrador deterring deer like the raised beds in the back yard are.
The soil has not yet been prepared for the rest of the bed; I’ll be amending it and planting heirloom Dragon Carrots (large purplish red beasts).
Flash Fiction:
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:
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Precarious: One Misfortune Away from Insolvency
We can summarize the changes in our economy over the past two generations with one word: precarity, as life for the bottom 90% of American households has become far more precarious over the past 40 years, despite the rising GDP and "wealth" as measured in phantom capital.
This reality is expressed in the portmanteau word precariat, combining proletariat (someone whose livelihood comes from their labor) and precarious: outside of government employment, work has become far more precarious. Where it was still common 40 years ago to work for a company for much or most of one's career and have a private-sector pension, now private-sector pensions have vanished, replaced by self-managed 401K funds, and private-sector work is characterized by a series of not just job changes but career changes.
The source of one's livelihood can dry up and blow away almost overnight, and to fill the hole many turn to gig-work with zero benefits that saddles the worker with self-employment taxes (15.3% of all earnings, as the "self-employed" gig worker must pay both the employee and the employer shares of Social Security-Medicare payroll taxes).
This isn't true self-employment, of course…
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
HHS looks to debar group at center of COVID lab-leak theories
Politics:
Democrats Say They Won’t Save Mike Johnson Next Time
Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) appearance at former President Trump’s criminal trial on Tuesday is dismaying the House Democrats who saved his job less than a week ago.
The trip is sending ripples through the Democratic ranks and is already being raised in leadership circles.
How CNN and ABC Snagged the Debates
Since 1987, presidential debates have been simulcast on every major channel in the country. But President Biden’s shock announcement that he would skip this fall’s preplanned matchups in favor of debates sponsored by individual news outlets sent network executives into a scramble.
Such debates typically take months to plan. Instead, in three hours, CNN and ABC News outmaneuvered their rivals to land a pair of prime-time face-offs between Mr. Biden and former President Donald Trump that promise enormous ratings and prestige.
Biden started the plane’s engine and Trump waked right into the propeller blade?
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DeSantis signs bill wiping climate change references from Florida law
Fox attacks Michael Cohen as a “convicted liar,” leaves out that his lies were to protect Trump
Supreme Court Orders Louisiana to Use New Map
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday effectively ordered Louisiana to hold this fall’s congressional elections using two Black majority districts instead of one.
The high court did so by suspending a three-judge panel’s decision that threw out a map drawn by the Louisiana Legislature in January to create two minority-majority districts.
Four dead in New Caledonia riots as France declares state of emergency
Russian Disinformation Videos Smear Biden
Russian operatives are leaning into videos, many of them that falsely purport to be made by independent journalists or whistle-blowers. The videos, opposed to blog or social media posts, are more likely to spread beyond the conspiratorial fringes of America and become part of mainstream discourse.
Serendipity:
Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture
Mathematicians have disproved a major conjecture about the relationship between curvature and shape.
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Ah yes more #hivegarden with our blockchain growers
Finishing up my beds this weekenx and will get some planting done now that risk of frost is so much less.