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When I was a kid, tobacco was a common horse wormer.

I have a little rufous hen with a nest full of hatchlings. She is shuttling between her nest and the feeder to keep her babies fed.

A wheelbarrow is how the wood moves from the wood shed to the garage, then I feed the wood stove out of the wheelbarrow. I have two, both with foam filled tires.

We went with Corian counters. My wife is of the opinion that granite counters are the avocado appliances of the 21st century.

Getting older is always voluntary.

The next generation of farmers will be Hispanic. Anglos won't do the work, and don't develop the skills.

And the work doesn't get done

Ah. Economics class wisdom. Here's a hint: Economists are witch doctors shaking their rattles. They know nothing. They certainly know nothing of social services or immigration. The gatekeepers are supposed to hand out visas at the border, but they don't. There are nowhere near enough H2-A visas...

I don't know what country you live in. Here in the USA, if they engage any federal agency La Migra will come and deport them. They live and work in secret. You don't even see them on the street.

Applications vary. I rarely grease my front loader, since I sometimes go weeks without using it. OTOH, the PTO drive shafts get a workout, often running under load at speed for hours a day. The 3-point is fine getting greased once a week. Implements vary. I still have a rig with zerks on the...

That's very interesting. I doubt the grease from 70 years ago compares to modern grease, but high quality lubricants are worth the money. They are sure cheaper than repairs!

If the country wants the revenue, they should make it legal for immigrants to work. I'm not responsible for stupid decisions I had no part in making.

You have no clue how big the underground economy is. A decent guess is $2.8 trillion a year. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/032916/how-big-underground-economy-america.asp

We get the labor, she gets the money. What's cruel about that?

To bring this back around to retirement, secret immigrants are a great way to get work done that is difficult as you age. Maria cleans the house. Jesus does the yard work. If you pay them in cash, who is to know? As for their immigration status, don't ask, don't tell.

What's your definition of "unskilled?" It sounds like you equate it to "unnecessary." Those businesses don't really need workers, do they?

Did you watch the results of the metal-metal wear test? That film strength is amazing.

The work force is shrinking, and will continue to shrink until we boost immigration numbers. Businesses are on the other end of "You're lucky to have a job." Now it's "You're lucky to find someone to do the job."

That's the conventional wisdom, but I don't think it's true. There are about the same number of workers in computer science now as there were 30 years ago, while the number of low paid service workers has increased over 10%. Elimination of high paid production workers has contributed greatly to...

I have been using Sta-Lube lithium-moly grease for years. I may have changed my mind. Lucas may be worth the extra money. What do you think?

Perhaps you don't understand my proposal. I was not suggesting a tax that applied to all businesses, I was suggesting a tax that applies to technology that eliminates the job base. It's enough to change the calculation. Do you pay for robots, or do you pay for workers? If we're going to rescue...

Or just let old folks starve and die.

Rather than tax rate increases, I think they should broaden the tax base. Manufacturing robots are taking family wage jobs, so they should tax manufacturing robots. As AI replaces higher income jobs like stock brokers, programmers, and screen writers, they should tax the AI. For decades we have...

If you really want to tease a cause out of the correlation, I would suggest that people in poor health don't have as many opportunities for a high paying job. Even so, with regular health care many causes of early death are manageable like diabetes, or preventable, like colon cancer. One quarter...

Just about anyone considers SS to be money in the bank. My wife is one of them. If it weren't for me, we wouldn't have an emergency fund. She typically earned more than I did during our working years, but has no savings of any kind. She never met a dollar she didn't have to spend.

It's a good idea to prep for a default. It may not happen, but if it does it will be chaos. With no SS, people won't be able to pay their supplemental insurance, prescription co-pays, car insurance, life insurance, and a host of other bills that are required. If you can get an early RMD just to...

Income is the primary determinate of lifespan. A few years ago they did a study of Salem, Oregon. High income areas (West Salem) had a 10 year higher life expectancy than East Salem, a more middle class area. Throw a large East Coast poverty and minority population into the works and I can...

I just put up another feeder, not because of traffic. We have a little Rufous rooster who attacks any bird trying to use his feeder, except for hens of his own species. He's a cocky little guy and makes it hard on other birds. The Annas are peaceful and get along with everyone, so now they have...

I think the snows in California were hard on the West Coast population. Our feeders are way down from last year. It may have been the bird flu too.

The social problem is that we are creating a new nobility. We just don't call it that. Several states have legalized dynasty trusts that never expire. There is good reason we have a constitutional ban on titles of nobility. The Europe the first colonists fled was owned by the aristocracy. It...

That's a great way to go. My dad always said he hoped he had a heart attack while farming. No such luck. He died of lung cancer, and it wasn't pretty. OTOH, one of my mom's friends was found on a bench by her back door, with her boot laces still in her hands. What a great way to die.

Retirement does not mean you quit working, it means you quit working for someone else. The only reason to sit around is so they can measure you for a coffin.

If you look at the 62-69 group as a whole, you see the results of people taking early retirement because they were frozen out of the job market as they aged. It can be poor health, age discrimination, or other factors, but I have known a lot of people who have just said, "Screw it, I quit!"...

Back in the '50s we discussed how changing the appearance of cars every year was a waste of money. The VW Bug was the economical way to do it.

That's why building codes require a firewall separation between the garage and habitable rooms. I got to pull a fire alarm for a parking structure car fire once.

Yeah, multiply by 1000. That makes more sense.

Things are moving so fast an energy company can start an $8 billion power project and not even make page 6. Google is your friend.

It seems to me that the "grid" is rapidly getting fixed. SunZia is breaking ground on 3500 mw and a HVDC transmission line that will let them move the power around. The US has been lagging the rest of the world in wind power, but we are catching up. The HVDC lines are the game changer. They let...

So that number was watt-hours? At 60 mph, (a mile a minute) that's 5.29 watt-minutes. The numbers make no sense to me. I can't imagine pushing a vehicle down the highway on the wattage of a LED light bulb.

745.7 watts per horsepower.

Watt-whats? Watt-minutes? Watt-hours? If you are using 317 watt-hours per mile, that's a big suck. No way that's power draw. You are not moving any car at street speeds with less than 1/2 hp.

Lithium's days may be numbered. This guy explains more than you ever wanted to know about batteries, starting in ancient Babylon. He gets to the 21st century about halfway through. Solid state batteries could double the storage of current batteries. A 1000 mile range is not out of the question...

Bullet trap. A downward angled steel plate will do it for pistol and small caliber, a berm or bales will do it for rifles. For bird shot, stick to non-toxic or trap/skeet ranges. My rod and gun club mines the trap range for lead every few years and harvests a couple tons, plus pH manages the...

Yeah, Russian thistle (tumbleweed) is hugely invasive. It has become so common in parts of the West that people don't realize it's not native. We have a similar problem with Himalaya blackberry in Western Oregon. It was introduced by Luther Burbank, a great horticulturalist with no sense of...

Basal applications are the way to go to confine herbicides. I use a 50/50 mix of Crossbow and transmission fluid. If it's small enough to cut at ground level, I use a small squirt bottle on the bare wood. Dead. For larger trees, slash and squirt is the way to go. Cut the bark with a machete or...

I doubt California will ever go back to tarpaper shacks and outhouses.

Religion and politics in one sentence. Impressive.

I have a friend who lives about 6,000 ft. outside Lakeview. He's been snowed in for 12 days, after 4' of snow that is still snowing. It snowed here, south of Roseburg, Monday morning, just a fine powder that was melted off by afternoon. That's the latest I have ever seen snow, but May 15 is...

The boomer divide is still with us. The people who look back on the '50s as a great time didn't grow up in the '50s. Kids ran head on into puberty with absolutely no sexual instruction. Girls were treated as commodities whose innocence had to be guarded, with the result that my classmates...