Quite a day! Queen Elizabeth died today at age 96, ending the longest British reign. To me personally, that is moving and important news.
I have heard that many businesses and projects and group efforts are being affected both by covid illnesses and by reconsiderations of how and where people want to work. We got our first mail delivery in several days a few minutes ago. Our regular mailman explained a week or so ago the difficulties local mail was having staffing all the routes.
We are reading The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah about the Depression and the Dust Bowl and she gives us a thorough taste of misery and fear and despair from the event:
How many Okies moved to California?
From 1935 to 1940 California received more than 250,000 migrants from the Southwest. A plurality of the impoverished ones came from Oklahoma. Supposedly, the Dust Bowl forced "Okies" off their land, but far more migrants left southeastern Oklahoma than the Dust Bowl region of northwestern Oklahoma and the Panhandle.
Okie Migrations | The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture
https://www.okhistory.org › publications › enc › entry
Search for: How many Okies moved to California?
Where did most Dust Bowl migrants go?
The press called them Dust Bowl refugees, although actually few came from the area devastated by dust storms. Instead they came from a broad area encompassing four southern plains states: Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. More than half a million left the region in the 1930s, mostly heading for California.
Dust Bowl migration - University of Washington
https://depts.washington.edu › moving1 › dustbowl_mi…
Among other displacements and changes, I contribute to the problem of Amazon.com. I have read that the company has modified American business and led others into online shopping. I regularly buy my favorite cereal, almond nut-thin crackers, dates and sugared ginger in bulk from Amazon. I get a good price and fast service but this morning, I read of a new problem in Numlock News:
Tired
Motor vehicle tires are made out of a bunch of petrochemicals these days, and they basically spend their existence gradually shedding microplastics every time a car moves or brakes. This isn't great, and adds up: One study estimated that per capita Americans are responsible for about 4.7 kilograms (10 pounds) of tire-related microplastic emissions per year. Electric vehicles aren't going to help this, either; they're heavy and so they actually will make this specific type of pollution a little worse, in fact. A gas car sheds 73 milligrams per kilometer from four new tires compared to an EV, which will shed 88 milligrams per kilometer. Until there's a technical or materials component, the best way to mitigate these emissions is the same way you'd reduce normal tire wear: drive gently.
