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Category Archives: Economic issues

Kill your dryer

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

According to an article at grist.org, Americans spend about $9 billion a year on electricity to power their clothes dryers. While appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines have made great strides in energy efficiency, dryers have not. In 2014, the Natural Resources Defense Council published a “call for action” for more-efficient clothes dryers. It […]

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Farms and farmland: What are the trends?

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

This is the farm of my great uncle Barney Dalton in Laurel Fork, Virginia. Barney was born in 1876 and died in 1972, but his farm is still owned by his heirs, who work hard to keep it looking like it looked 75 years ago. A story in this morning’s Winston-Salem Journal (by my friend […]

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Fiber gets closer

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Generally, if I see heavy equipment anywhere within miles of the abbey, it’s a reason for panic. It means that someone is cutting trees to sell logs, or someone is up to some kind of mischief with a bull dozer. But there is one kind of machinery that is a joy to see nearby. That’s […]

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Review: Inequality: What Can Be Done?

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Here are two must-read books for those who care about the human condition in an era in which we are immersed in a dumber-than-rocks political and media culture. I read Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century last year shortly after it came out. That book has received an enormous amount of attention among […]

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What blowback looks like

Friday, May 29, 2015

After the little town of Walnut Cove agreed to let the state of North Carolina (at taxpayer expense) drill a geological core sample on town property to test for the presence of frackable gas, what followed was an uprising. These photos are from a press conference called by the state and national NAACP to announce […]

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What’s next around here?

Saturday, April 25, 2015

The county convention of the Stokes County Democratic Party, April 21 In July, this blog will be eight years old. Soon I’ll reach the 1,000th post. Any blog that has been around this long is bound to go through changes and fallow periods. But I’m not going away. I’m just trying to get clear on […]

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The high existential cost of being rich

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Source: careerassessmentsite.com Do you know your personality type, as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test? If not, with a little Googling you’ll probably find a way to get a quick and dirty assessment, if not the trademarked test. But the odds are that, if you are reading this blog, then you are not rich, […]

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Ken in the New York Times

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Woody Welch for the New York Times Ken has a longish piece to be published in Sunday’s New York Times. It was released to the web today. It’s a sort of preview of his book, which will be released May 14.

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How much coal to power our houses?

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Duke Power’s Belews Creek Steam Station, Belews Creek, North Carolina My post yesterday was about how many kilowatt hours of electricity the abbey uses on a cold winter day. Though I use about half as much energy as the average American, there are no grounds for boasting. When that energy use is translated into pounds […]

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Smart meters, and the cost of staying warm

Saturday, January 26, 2013

The green bars show my daily electricity usage for January in kilowatt hours. Below: a smart meter. A year or two ago, my electric company — a regional electric coop named Energy United — installed “smart meters.” The purpose of these meters is to save the power company money, because no one has to be […]

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