Last week I wrote about my latest step in going a month off-grid in Manhattan: buying (used, off Craigslist) the solar panels to power the battery I bought last year. First: solar panels and batteries are not sustainable. They require fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources for manufacture, with no end in sight for that dependence. I don’t pretend using them is clean. Cleaner than burning oil or coal isn’t[…] Keep reading →

I prefer writing my own posts, but some material is so valuable but not what the internet will spread enough, and I post them. The material in question is a series called Not Just Bikes, by a guy born in Canada who moved to Holland, preferred how the Dutch designed their cities, and makes videos describing what they do that works. I love the videos. I probably refer more people[…] Keep reading →

I last emptied my trash on December 25, 2019. My current load is close to full, though if I squeeze it, it compresses. That is, it doesn’t weigh much. I consider it too much so I hope to impose less waste on future generations next time. I’ll wait until at least January 1 to empty it so I can say I didn’t empty a load in two consecutive calendar years.[…] Keep reading →

I just finished my second set today of twice-daily burpee-based calisthenics. Normally, I do my second set in the evening, but since I started the habit on December 22, 2011 and today is December 21, 2021, today completes my first decade. I already finished my first decade of publishing blog posts, nearing 5,000. Here are all of them. 20 percent of the time has been on a single load of[…] Keep reading →

Our culture promotes the wrong idea that buying things brings happiness. More like addiction. Stores yesterday were busy fake marking up prices to fake mark them back down. They aren’t doing you any favors. Did you know that many manufacturers make lower quality items specifically for this time of year. They break down sooner, costing you more, filling landfills more. But they really hit the poorest this way, which is[…] Keep reading →

Go back and listen to my conversations with the writers who wrote on slavery: Adam Hoschschild and his book Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves Eric Metaxas and his book Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery Manisha Sinha and her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition Andrés Reséndez and his book The Other Slavery: The[…] Keep reading →

People who don’t want to act on the environment will create and believe any rationalization to justify not acting. A common one is to say what they do doesn’t matter. Or that their results wouldn’t make a difference. I kept myself from acting for years for “reasons” like these. Nobody said to act once and stop. Any one individual action divided by the results of billions of others rounds to[…] Keep reading →

My spreadsheet said I hit 175,000 burpees yesterday. I don’t record each one. I programmed in how many I do each day. I update the date and it tells me how many I’ve done. So I’ve done more, since occasionally I do extra without telling the spreadsheet. A decade ago, I’d record what felt like big milestones like my first six months of doing them daily or the first ten[…] Keep reading →

When I describe how I take two years to fill a load a garbage in part by buying fresh farmers market produce, I’m usually talking to people who can afford more than I can. They eat out, order takeout, buy bottled water, and eat a lot of meat without worry. Still, they say farmers markets cost more. When I tell them I pay less than the average American on food,[…] Keep reading →