Well,
a) this is a blog, after all, and
b) if the President can flip flop daily on tariffs, then
c) it’s hard to see the shame in having a mere blog post that wanders a bit.
1: AI replacement theory
1: Every human job that can be replaced by AI will be.
2: Every human job that requires speech and reasoning alone is at immediate risk of being replaced by AI.
3: All other human occupations will be condensed to the portions that can’t feasibly be replaced by AI.
These are laws of economics, not computer science. New technologies have been doing this sort of thing since the start of the industrial revolution. There’s nothing about this that’s entirely unique to AI.
This time, instead of technology making your biceps obsolete, now it’s making your brain obsolete. The most important difference between the AI revolution and what has gone before is that this time, they’re coming for my job.
I just can’t quite get my big brain around the fact that my big brain is obsolete.
It’s going to take me a while — like a few posts — to work out the ramifications of that, to my own satisfaction.
If nothing else, if this does what I think it’s going to do, to “knowledge workers” generically, that’s got to be nothing but bad news for the real estate market here in Northern Virginia. Pile on a dip in Federal employment, and, as I live here, I should pay attention to what’s happening with AI.
Even though I’d much rather not.
2: My garden is a mess
Yonder it sits, as of late fall of last year (left), and as of about 5 minutes ago (right).
In theory, this should be some sort of planned operation. E.g., I want to grow such-and-such, in this-and-so quantity. And so on.
In practice, I can’t even get that far.
Instead, this has turned into a game of fixing the worst errors, then seeing what’s left.
First, I need to get the sun-rotting plastic out of my garden, and disposed of. But, as I (intentionally!) made the raised beds by recycling plastic coroplast campaign signs, removing those plastic sides effectively destroys all the existing raised beds.
But, second, I always intended these beds to be temporary, and, ultimately, I figured the dirt would fill some of the worst “valleys” in my back yard. So that’s what I’m doing — dismembering the side-less corpses of these raised beds and using the dirt to fill the largest and most annoying valleys in my lawn.
(These “valleys” are the aftermath of the installation of the ground loop for the ground source heat pump, and they continue to sink, ever-so-gently, 20 years after that was installed. It really does not surprise me that this method (parallel trenches 6′ deep) seems relatively rarely used, compared to drilling a vertical well for the ground loop. I already shoveled 10 tons of dirt trying to fill those valleys the first time.)
Third, I’m re-using the concrete corner blocks from the defunct low beds to build fewer, taller, better-placed raised beds. I don’t actually want the resulting raised beds, but they are a place to store the concrete corner blocks, and most importantly, to store some of the soil that’s in the former plastic-sided beds.
Interesting calculation there. When I started these beds, I brought in 10 cubic yards of 50/50 mixed topsoil and compost. And now, when I do the arithmetic on what’s left (bed dimensions x bed depth = volume of soil in bed), come up with about 5 cubic yards. Which is just about exactly what I ought to have, if all the organic matter (the compost) in the original mix has rotted and so returned to being C02. The upshot being that, at a density of about a ton per cubic yard, I’d have to shovel 5 tons of dirt, to get rid of these beds. Not clear I’m up to that task any more. Not clear that I’m not.
So, as stupid as it was to have to move a raised bed once, I am, in effect, moving them twice. But the second time is largely to get rid of their dirt. It’s a planned-life-cycle kind of thing.
And the new garden plan, such as it is, involves growing more stuff that neither the deer nor the bugs want to eat. But that my wife and I do.
That’s a very short list of crops. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten on my garden plan for 2025.
3: Bee hotels, the final chapter begins
I am putting up my native (mason, orchard) bee hotels for the last time. Mine are bundles of 6″ (or so) bamboo tubes, with smooth-cut ends (cut while green, or commercial pre-sanded cutoffs), with inside diameter around 3/8″ inch. Above, I’m using Virginia clay to seal off one end of each tube. When I have those sealed and dry to my satisfaction, those bundles of nesting tubes will be hung securely over the site of the emergence box (Post G25-001), ready for spring to commence. And for the female mason bees to use at their convenience. Next spring, the (now filled, hopefully) bundles of nesting tubes will have to be taken down and placed in next year’s bee emergence box.
