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Category: government

Thursday, 24 September 2015

07:25 – I have a bone to pick with the US federal government. Why are they wasting the time of SEAL Team Six, Delta Force, and so on by sending them out to track down and kill minor annoyances like Osama bin Laden, when they could instead be sending them out to track down and kill phone and email spammers? I’m completely serious here. I get a dozen or more spam phone calls and thousands of spam emails every day, and I’m sure I’m not alone. (Yes, our phone number is on the DNC list; makes no difference as far as I can tell. What we need is a C/EMAD Call/Email Me And Die list.) We should be relentlessly hunting down and killing telemarketers and email spammers, wherever in the world they may be. And it’s a self-limiting problem. We’d probably have to blow away only 10,000 or 100,000 of them before the rest got the message. What do you call 10,000 dead phone/email spammers? A good start.

Email from Jen. She and her husband are considering improving their alternative electric power situation. They currently have a generator and a limited supply of fuel as well as a 14W portable solar charger. The former is fine until the fuel runs out, and latter is fine if all you need to do is keep a few AA and AAA cells charged. They’re thinking about a low-end off-grid solar installation. They don’t expect to run their AC or even their freezer or furnace, but they would like a bit more solar capacity.

Jen mentioned that they were thinking about buying and installing a Renogy 400W off grid kit and had a lot of questions about whether to go with the MPPT or PWM charge controller, what other items they’d need to buy, how much actual electric power they could expect a small system like this to produce, and so on.

I told her that I’m not an expert on solar power, but I’d be inclined to go with the MPPT charge controller. If they’re concerned about EMP or a solar flare they can stick everything in a Faraday cage and perhaps buy a spare PWM charge controller. Those cost only $35 or so. Under ideal conditions, which conditions never are in the real world, they could expect those four 100W panels to produce maybe 2 kW-hours per day. Real world, I wouldn’t count on much more than 1 to 1.25 KW-hour per day, or about as much as their generator will produce in ten minutes. Still, that’s roughly 25 times as much as their little 14W portable panel produces, and enough to keep all of their rechargeable cells and small devices charged.

They would also need several deep-cycle batteries (like golf-cart batteries), along with the cables to connect their solar charging system to their battery bank and a decent inverter to output 120VAC, ideally a true sine-wave model. A 35 amp-hour 12V deep-cycle battery runs about $75, so they could expect to spend $300+ on those batteries. In a pinch, I told Jen they could recharge standard 12V automobile batteries, although their plates are designed for very high current draws for short periods of time (running a car starter motor) rather than low current draw for long periods, and using car batteries to substitute for deep-cycle batteries would greatly reduce their useful lifetimes. The price of an inverter is determined by its output waveform–square-wave inverters are cheaper than sawtooth or modified sine-wave inverters, which in turn are cheaper than true sine-wave inverters–and its peak/sustained amp rating.

Although I didn’t suggest doing so, I told Jen that they could also get by with buying only the panels themselves and some batteries, doing without both the charge controller and the inverter. These panels output about 18V under ideal conditions, which means they actually output considerably less voltage under real world conditions. They could hook up panels in parallel to provide that same less-than-18V output and run it directly to their battery bank to charge the batteries. They’d have to keep a close eye on things to avoid over-charging or self-discharging but it could be done, although I’d recommend spending the $35 on a basic charge controller. Either way, they could keep a significant amount of energy stored in their battery bank, which they could use with a battery charger intended to operate on normal 12V vehicle power. They’d be able to keep a boatload of 1.2V NiMH cells charged, as well as small portable electronics like emergency lighting, radios, tablets, or notebooks.

Read the comments: 70 Comments

Tuesday, 25 August 2015

08:14 – One of the interesting aspects of offering a free sample chapter of the prepping book is all the emails I get from people whose names I don’t recognize because they never post comments here, including a disproportionate number of women. Maybe 1% of my male readers ever post a comment here; for female readers, it’s probably more like 0.1%. Given that my readership is probably 10:1 male:female, that means we see very, very few comments from women. Perhaps I’ve made this journal unfriendly to women. If so, it’s not intentional and I regret that I seem to attract mostly you crotchety old bastards who are always commenting.

Yesterday’s stock market crash seems to be leveling out, although a significant minority of observers believe much worse things are imminent and even most of the optimists appear to be badly shaken. If one thing is clear, it’s that China is out of control. Yesterday wasn’t the big crash that a lot of people are expecting, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. The big crash is coming, maybe not today or next month or even this year, but it is coming. And when it comes it seems likely that it will start in China and quickly flood over the EU like a tsunami. The US and Canada are the only real havens. They’ll both take severe hits, but nothing like the rest of the world.

Barbara’s first day back at work yesterday was uneventful. She’s turning things over to the several people who will replace her, teaching them what she does. It sounds like her final five weeks at work will be relatively calm, which is a good thing.

If you’d like a PDF copy of Chapter 1 of the prepping book, email me at thompson (at) ttgnet (dot) com with the subject line “book sample”. I’ll send you the PDF.

10:34 – At Lynn’s suggestion, I just added the following text as a sidebar in Chapter 1.

What About Cooling?

Cold can kill, but so can heat, particularly the elderly, infants, and others who are less able than most people to tolerate high temperatures and humidity. With power down, the lack of air conditioning can be a lethal threat to these vulnerable people.

Unfortunately, it takes a lot of power to run a whole-house air conditioning system, much more than is practical for most people to make provision for. Keeping whole-house air conditioning running during a power outage requires a very large generator and the fuel to run it.

If you must have cooling, there are two practical options:

First, you can buy a high-efficiency, inverter-based generator1, store enough fuel to run it for the expected duration of the power outage, and use it to power a small portable or window air conditioner to cool one room.

Second, you can do what our ancestors did before there was air conditioning. If you still have running water, use cool water for frequent cooling baths or showers. Utility water usually comes from the tap at about the average year-round temperature for your location. For example, the annual average temperature in Dallas, Texas is about 67 °F and that of Boston, Massachusetts is about 52 °F, so utility water temperatures in those cities are normally within ±5 or 10 °F of those temperatures. (Oddly, the water temperature is usually somewhat higher in cold months and somewhat lower in warm months because it takes six months or so for air temperature changes to penetrate the soil to the depth at which water pipes are usually buried.) Utility water at 65 or 70 °F is far enough below body temperature that bathing or showering in it will cool you down quickly. In fact, spending too long in cool water can produce hypothermia.

If you don’t have running water, use whatever water you do have. Other than shallow ponds, the temperature of natural water sources like streams, rivers, and lakes is usually much lower than the ambient air temperature.

Read the comments: 130 Comments

Tuesday, 4 August 2015

09:04 – Science kit sales are starting to ramp up nicely. The real crunch starts mid-month. In past Augusts, we’ve done 33% to 38% of total monthly sales during the first half of the month and 62% to 67% in the second half. That continues through about mid-September and then gradually tapers off before it hits another smaller peak in December and January.

I see that Puerto Rico has now joined Greece in official default. They’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. They had a $58 million debt payment due yesterday, and were able to scrounge up less than a million, putting them in default. Of course, the $58 million is a drop in the bucket compared to their $72 billion in outstanding debt, which they have no prospect of repaying. And there’s no provision in the law for them to declare bankruptcy. They’re toast, unless US taxpayers come to the rescue, which I’m betting is what will happen one way or another. Can’t let the banks and funds take a loss, you know. Private profit and taxpayers footing losses is the new normal.

Speaking of Greece, their financial markets opened yesterday for the first time in weeks. The result was predictable, a catastrophic slide comparable to Wall Street on Black Friday in 1929. And today is more of the same. Private investors in Greek stocks, banks, and bonds are being wiped out as you read this. I don’t think Greece has many skyscrapers, which is fortunate because otherwise there’d be lots of people jumping out of their windows, producing a hazard to pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks beneath. I have no sympathy for the Greeks. They spent themselves into this hole, and they’re going to experience biblical suffering as a result. I just hope the same is true for Puerto Rico, although I doubt that will happen. But if it did it might at least provide an object lesson for governments elsewhere.

More science kits to build and ship.

13:09 – I look back fondly to the days when I could remember the name of everyone who’d ever ordered a science kit from us, from day one on. Sitting here, I just realized that I can’t remember the names of even the people who’ve ordered nine kits so far today. My memory is a pale shadow of what it once was, but this is ridiculous.

It’s only going to get worse when Barbara retires from the law firm and comes to work more-or-less full time for our business. That’ll allow me to ramp things up to the point where we’re shipping at least four or five times as many science kits as we do now. So far, I’ve intentionally kept a low profile to keep demand manageable. In 2016 and beyond, we’ll be intentionally growing the business, introducing many new kits and addressing new market segments.

I still want to keep things home-based and avoid hiring any employees, but even within those constraints there’s a lot we can do to expand volume. When we first started up, I remember laughing at the idea that USPS would send a special truck to our house to pick up shipments if we needed them to. At the time, that seemed very unlikely to happen, but it may before too much longer. It’s actually happened a couple times already, when USPS showed up and I had 30 or 40 kits to ship that day. He had to take what he had room for in the truck, go back to the post office to drop off his load, and return to pick up the rest of my packages.

Read the comments: 122 Comments

Thursday, 23 July 2015

08:37 – The Greek parliament has once again voted in favor of complying with the Troika’s new “austerity” terms, which amounts to committing national economic suicide in aid of being allowed to remain in the eurozone. And it’s all for nothing. The Greek people seem to believe that staying in the euro guarantees that they will continue to receive the huge subsidies they’ve been receiving for a decade or more, allowing them to maintain a much higher standard of living than they earn. It doesn’t. Greeks will never see a cent of the additional money that the Troika may “lend” to Greece. Those funds will be used to benefit Greece’s creditors, and only the creditors. Meanwhile, Greece will continue going deeper and deeper into debt until it all finally collapses. Greece would be far, far better off departing the euro, defaulting on everything it owes, and returning to the drachma. Yes, that would mean that Greece would be unable to borrow money on the open market for at least a decade and probably two and that Greeks would suffer deep poverty for that same period, but that’s actually the best they can hope for.

On Jen’s recommendation, I started reading Ken Benton’s SurviRal last night. She said it wasn’t a great book, but it was worlds better than most of the recent PA fiction. She’s right. The guy writes competently, and the book is reasonably well edited. It’s a bit odd in that the protagonists are a married couple of anti-prepping clueless Denver suburbanites who are religious but not obnoxiously so, but have a well-prepared brother down in the sticks a hundred miles or so south of them. This is the first recent PA novel I’ve read that I haven’t wanted to start marking up with a red pen, put a circled D or F on the front page, and add a note to try again and get it right before submitting it.

More work on science kits today.

Read the comments: 33 Comments

Tuesday, 14 July 2015

08:53 – I wrote Sunday,

“As far as I can see, the only way out of this for Greece, if there is any way out, is for the EU to abolish government at all levels in Greece and appoint a receiver to oversee the bankruptcy of Greece and the auctioning off of Greek assets to pay off the creditors. Greece will have to become an EU colony for the foreseeable future, ceding all local control.”

but I didn’t actually expect them to do it. I underestimated just how much the Germans and the rest of the Northern Tier distrust Greece, because that’s essentially what they’ve gotten Tsipras to agree to. Whether or not the Greek legislators vote tomorrow to accept those humiliating terms is still very much up in the air. And, even if they do, it’s extremely unlikely that the Northern Tier will agree to fund yet another “bail out” for Greece, knowing that Greece will never repay the earlier bail outs, let alone the one under discussion. Payback, as they say, is a bitch.

My next task is to build another 60 biology kits and chemistry kits, which I’ll be working on over the next few days. With what we already have on hand, those should be enough to carry us through July and into August. Once I get those built, we’ll go back to making up solutions, labeling and filling bottles, and making up subassemblies for yet another batch of kits.

Barbara’s TV remote stopped working a week or so ago. When I popped the lid of the battery compartment, I found that the two AAA alkalines had leaked. At the time, I thought nothing about it. I just cleaned out the compartment, put a fresh pair of alkalines in, and gave it back to her. The other night, it stopped working again. When I opened it, the new cells had leaked. So this time I rinsed it out thoroughly under running tap water and put it aside to dry completely. This morning, I used a hair dryer for a couple of minutes to make sure the interior was dry, and again replaced the two AAA alkalines from a new pack of them. It works. We’ll see if it keeps working or the cells leak again.

Which has gotten me thinking about replacing all of our AA and AAA alkalines with low self-discharge (LSD) NiMH cells. We’ll use up our remaining stock of alkalines, which is around 100 of the AAA’s and maybe 40 of the AA’s, and then shift over to the rechargeables. For now, I’m going to pull the alkalines from our long-term storage stuff–flashlights, radios, etc.–and put the devices and a couple sets of alkalines with taped terminals in plastic bags.

We have a few devices that use C or D alkalines, mostly flashlights and lanterns, and those are a problem to convert to NiMH. C and D cells make up a tiny percentage of sales. AA and AAA combined are literally something like 97% of sales. So C or D NiMH cells are pretty hard to find, even on-line. When you can find them, they fall into one of three categories: ones made by name-brand alkaline companies like Duracell, Energizer and other mass-market suppliers, cheap Chinese ones that I wouldn’t trust, and the big name-brand NiMH cells like MaHa and Powerex. The Duracell/Energizer class ones are crap. They don’t want to cannibalize their alkaline sales, so their NiMH models are generally pathetic, with capacities of maybe 2,500 mAH in D (versus 10,000 to 12,000 mAH for the good brands). Their only advantage is that they’re reasonably inexpensive, roughly four or fives times the $1.25 price of an alkaline. Many of the Chinese no-name D cells have reasonable rated capacities of 8,000 to 10,000 mAH, but that’s usually grossly exaggerated and these rechargeables tend to die fairly young. Then there are the good brands, which have high capacities and are quite reliable. The problem with them is the price, typically $30 or so each. And, to top it all off, probably half of the available C and D models use early generation technology and are not low self-discharge. So I think we’ll stick with alkalines for our C and D devices.

Read the comments: 43 Comments

Monday, 13 July 2015

09:17 – This guy gets it: On Second Thought, Stick to Your Guns He understands that US supporters of the 2nd Amendment are going to keep our guns. They’re not for hunting. They’re not for recreational shooting. They’re for the reason that the 2nd Amendment was written in the first place: to keep the government in line.

And here’s a story about a Customer service shocker. Having dealt with this company frequently for years, it’s not shocking to me. What’s shocking is that it’s not the norm. It used to be.

The headlines are shouting that the Greek crisis is over. Not even close. All that that Marathon 17-hour session accomplished was Greece agreeing to even more stringent terms ahead of any discussions about a further bailout, in exchange for the EU providing a trickle of additional funding. Chances are there won’t be any future bailout, because that would require unanimous approval by all of the EU nations. The probability of that happening is close to zero. Even if Germany could somehow be persuaded to agree, there’s still Finland, Netherlands, Slovenia, Slovakia, and all three Baltic states, all of which are very strongly opposed to “lending” any more of their money to Greece.

10:33 – Email from Jen. She and her husband have been discussing buying a cabin up at the lake, about an hour’s drive from their home, at least under normal conditions. Interestingly, Jen, who is the strongly pro-prepping member of that couple, is opposed, while her husband is in favor.

Jen argues that it’s too far away, too expensive, might be impossible to get to if things really turn bad, and is a distraction from things they should be doing at home. I told Jen that I agree with her. Their home is already reasonably remote from the underclass. They have infrastructure already in place there, and a supportive group of friends and neighbors. If they were near a large city, that’d be one thing. Barbara and I are relocating in part because we’re currently inside the Winston-Salem city limits, entirely too close to large numbers of underclass scum. Jen and her husband are already located in an excellent location, so it makes sense to me that they should focus their efforts (and money) on improving where they are rather than looking for somewhere else to go. I could be wrong, but events are unpredictable, and as Frederick the Great said, “he who defends everything, defends nothing.”

15:22 – As if we needed more evidence, the Greeks are not the only lying weasels in this mess. The eurocrats are a bunch of lying liars as well. EU demands Britain joins Greek rescue fund

The UK needs to withdraw from the EU immediately. The EFTA (Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein), none of whom are EU members, has been encouraging the UK to withdraw from the EU and join them. That would make particular sense for the UK, which was one of the founding members of the EFTA. By doing so, the UK would get what it really wants–free trade with the EU–without any of the political or economic entanglements that are part of EU membership.

Read the comments: 66 Comments

Sunday, 12 July 2015

08:54 – Our cities are coming apart at the seams. “Police departments across the country that have spent years boasting about plummeting crime numbers are now scrambling to confront something many agencies have not seen in decades: more bloodshed.” And it’s not just the largest cities, either, nor is it just murder rates that are skyrocketing. Any town that has a significant underclass population is at risk. The progressives are doing their best to make it impossible for police to do their jobs, which should be and always was to protect decent people from the underclass leeches.

The eurocrats are making no progress on the Greek crisis, basically because none of the EU leaders believe the Greeks can be trusted. The Greeks have done nothing but lie. They lied their way into the EU originally, and they’ve done nothing since but make promises that they had no ability or intention to keep. The rest of the EU has finally come to realize that you can tell the Greeks are lying if their lips are moving. The Greeks make Joe Isuzu look honest.

As far as I can see, the only way out of this for Greece, if there is any way out, is for the EU to abolish government at all levels in Greece and appoint a receiver to oversee the bankruptcy of Greece and the auctioning off of Greek assets to pay off the creditors. Greece will have to become an EU colony for the foreseeable future, ceding all local control. Greece hasn’t had a functioning government in living memory and has no prospect of ever developing one on its own. It’s time to recognize that and bring in a non-Greek to get things back on a business-like footing.

Read the comments: 37 Comments

Friday, 3 July 2015

08:34 – Greece is in the toilet. Greek banks cumulatively are down to less than €500 million cash, or about €40 per person. With the daily €50 withdrawal limit, that means the banks will run completely out of cash this weekend. Ambulances aren’t running because more and more of them have run out of gasoline and can’t get more. Not that that really matters, because hospitals have run out of many critical drugs and can’t get more. Foreign tourists have been warned that food and drugs are so short that there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to eat or get urgent medical care. Famously, one Greek newlywed couple in New York is living on the street and begging for food because their credit cards are no longer honored.

It would appear that the goal of the eurocrats is to drive Tsipras from office and force the Greeks to knuckle under, after which a trickle of aid will resume, just enough to keep Greeks from starving. One way or another, Greece is finished, a failed state.

Unless Greece tells the EU to get stuffed, defaults on its existing debt pile, and abandons the euro for a native currency. That’s their best option at this point. The new drachma would be introduced at parity with the euro, and would quickly loose most of its nominal value. Greeks would face at least another decade of grinding poverty, much worse than they’ve already experienced. But the alternative of giving in to the EU and continuing with the euro is worse still.

We’re working all weekend on kit stuff. I was hoping to find a Confederate flag to fly out front tomorrow, but there are none for sale anywhere.

10:29 – We’re back from a quick Sam’s Club run, where we picked up Coke, orange juice, and not much else, other than 35 pounds of soybean oil. Now, to work on kits.

Read the comments: 46 Comments

Wednesday, 17 June 2015

08:15 – I see that asshole Obama now intends to remake America’s neighborhoods, making sure that every middle-class neighborhood will have plenty of poor people and gangbangers and other undesirables. For 50 years now, I’ve been saying that government is the enemy. More and more people are coming to understand that I’ve been right all along.

Decent people don’t want the underclass in our midst, and we keep taking steps to get away from them. Obama thinks we’ve been too successful, so his answer is to start distributing the underclass scum into nice areas, with the goal of turning those nice areas into underclass hellholes, spreading the misery as widely as possible instead of doing as he should and concentrating it into as few areas as possible. We used to call them ghettos.

If that asshole Obama could get away with it, I’m sure he’d like to put a gangbanger or other underclass scum in every spare bedroom in middle-class America. But he can’t get away with that, yet, so he’s going to do the best he can by using federal powers to mandate housing for underclass scum in nice areas. I don’t want underclass scum living near me. I don’t want underclass scum living, period.

So, what’s to be done?

Read the comments: 60 Comments

Tuesday, 16 June 2015

07:44 – All signs are that yet another Greek default is imminent, perhaps as soon as the end of the month. When or if that happens, Greece crashing out of the euro is almost inevitable. The follow-on effects on the European and world economies are unpredictable at this point, but they won’t be good, to put it mildly. Best case, eurozone taxpayers are left holding the bag and are likely to vent their fury on EU politicians and mainstream political parties, with unpredictable consequences and likely regime changes. Worst case, we’re looking at a catastrophe unfolding over the coming months and years that will make Lehman look minor and will spread to affect the rest of the G7. In any case, Greece is toast.

There’s some time left, but now would be a good time to get stocked up, if you haven’t done already.

13:17 – Email from Jen, saying that she’d ordered one can each of the Keystone canned chicken and pork to see how she and her family liked them. She commented that at $4.44 for a 14.5-ounce can the Keystone chicken was more expensive than the Costco Kirkland-branded chicken at $2.30 for a 12.5-ounce can, but that she wanted to try them side by side to see if the Keystone was enough better to justify the higher cost. Actually, the Costco product is more expensive because that 12.5-ounce can is “packed in water” and contains only 7 ounces of actual chicken. The Keystone product is “no water or broth added” and contains the full 14.5 ounces of actual chicken. On a per-ounce basis, the Costco canned chicken is just under $0.33, or about $5.25/lb., while the Keystone is about $0.306, or about $4.90/lb.

Keystone is even a better deal in the 28-ounce cans, which shouldn’t be a problem given how many people Jen plans to feed. The chicken in 28-ounce cans is $7.34, or $0.262/ounce or $4.19/lb. The 28-ounce cans of ground beef, pork, and turkey are less expensive than the chicken, at $6.28 each, or $0.224/ounce, or $3.59/lb.

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