Shopping List....

Everyone is on a budget these days, especially preppers.  It's hard enough when you are just trying to deal with today's needs, but when you are trying to set aside for the future, it's that much more difficult.  One way to prioritize is to buy things which are relatively inexpensive now but which will become much more expensive later on; Urban Survival Site has a list of 40 of these.  It's mostly common sense, but it's nice to have a list to make sure you are missing any.

Man with a Plan

Reverse Engineer posted his Energy Problem Solutions to the Doomstead Diner.  After having lost track of a wonderful article about growing algae for oil using carbon captured from a biomass-burning combined heat and power plant, I want to make sure I don't lose this:



Here is my plan for a sustainable Homo Sap society that is not down at H-G level.  I published it on OFW in the commentariat and it got about the same reception it would have received on NBL.

Energy Problem Solutions

I detailed in a prior post how to substitute distributed intermittent electric power for the current centralized on demand power grid for the public at large, as well as how to distribute out your factories and manufacturing in the places you can actually collect large amounts of renewable energy.  Such places are near large hydro facilities, near the ocean where you can capture steady Wave Action and Wind Power, in the Desert where you can capture reliable Solar Power and in geological hot spots like Iceland and Yellowstone where  Geothermal power can be captured in large quantities necessary for manufacturing.

However, these are not your only problems of course, the biggest one being transportation.

For this, you need to refurbish and upgrade the current rail systems.  Main long distance lines need to be electrified, with the power supplied all along the line through large solar and wind arrays.  Trains may not run continuously on these lines, they may have to wait for power to be supplied to the section of track they are on.  In the FSoA, these are only the main E-W and N-S rail lines.

Subsidiary lines which run off these routes can be run with Diesel-Electric Locomotives, utilizing biodiesel.  This brings goods within around a 300 mile radius to most locations in the FSoA.

Final transportation of goods is done with either animal power or small electrics which can be charged along the distribution route from wind and solar arrays.  Again, the transporter may have to wait a day or two to get enough power to continue with the journey to the final destination.

For Ocean Transport of goods between continents, we need to go back to smaller ships, primarily Sail.  However, there should be little need to move many goods between continents since all necessary items should be produced locally, such as food, clothing and shelter building materials.

The next area we are highly dependent on FF for is Agriculture, both for fertilizer and pesticides and for the machines necessary for large scale till farming of annuals.  We need to convert to growing mostly perennials on small plots of land cultivated through permaculture by individuals.  These biomes should be set up so there are competing insect predators to replace the pesticides.  Along with the permaculture biomes, we need to set up large scale hydroponics and aquaculture farms that are water and fertilizer conservative, and we need to recycle humanure into these facilities as fertilizer.

Most metals and other basic elements can be acquired scavenging from the debris left over from the Age of Oil.  What does need to still be mined can be done with electric heavy equipment periodically as power is available.  Large scale smelting of metal can be done with Solar Thermal plants, utilizing large fresnel lenses to concentrate heat.

Precursors for organic molecules we currently get from Oil can be grown and converted and polymerized as necessary, utililizing renewable electric production.

Now, will this syste support the current 7.2B people?  That is doubtful, but I do think it could support 700M.

The system will not be built from the top down, it has to build from the bottom up.  As the grand monetary system collapses, individual communities will need to set up their own systems for internal commerce.  Communities will need to be self-sufficient in food production for probably 50 years minimum before a larger food trading and distribution scheme could be worked out.

Bug Out Checklist

Bitsy Pieces over at TheSurvialistBlog produced a checklist to give out to family and friends who show up at her doorstep looking for help after a disaster strikes.  Commenters pointed out a number of problems with this, but also an alternate use: to make sure you are well-prepared.

Dome Sweet Dome

Michael Matthews is offering plans for what he calls the "Ultimate Survival Fortress".  I haven't bought it (yet), but it seems to be a fairly standard earth-bag type of dome home.  That said, the price he is asking seems quite reasonable for the knowledge he seems to be providing (and I am not an affiliate, so I am not getting any commissions).  While $1 a square foot is literally a dirt-cheap price for living space, I certainly would not want to make a mistake after putting in dozens or maybe hundreds of hours of heavy labor.

The Cure: Morning Coffee

A suburb in the Eastern United States
Several months before the Announcement


Jane walked to her big oak dining table, coffee with cream and two sugars in her right hand, the rolled-up newspaper from her front doorstep under her left arm.  She sat down and laid the paper on the table, grateful that her local newspaper was still in business and delivering papers to her doorstep.  Like most everyone, Jane had a tablet and a smartphone, but she spent enough of her day staring at screens.  When she sat down for her morning coffee, she enjoyed having the whole paper spread in front of her, turning it page by page.

In between, as she sipped her coffee, she liked to look out her big french doors just past the end of the table.  It had been a hard winter.  Even though the average temperature was a bit higher than normal, that just meant they had had more ice storms and less snow.  She couldn't ever remember the power going out as many times as it had that winter.  Now finally Spring was returning; the snow had melted, the animals were out and about, and the birds had returned.

She had an excellent view of her bird feeder, which she had just refilled the day before.  She was looking forward to watching their antics while she sipped her coffee and browsed the headlines.  Much to her chagrin, a squirrel was sitting on the bird feeder.  Just sitting there.  She would have to check the metal guard and figure out how it got past that.  Still, it was odd that it was just sitting there, quite still.  She expected it would have been trying to get at the bird food.  She wondered for a second if maybe someone was playing a practical joke and put a squirrel statue on her bird feeder.


Apparently that's what several starlings thought -- or maybe they just didn't see the squirrel. Two landed on the same side as the squirrel, three on the opposite side.  That appeared to break the squirrel out of its trance.  It lunged for the nearest starling, who didn't have a chance to react, and sunk its teeth into the hapless bird's neck.  The others started to fly off, but the squirrel leapt onto the other bird on the same side of the feeder and bit its wing.

With a mad fluttering of wings, starling and squirrel spiraled to the ground until the squirrel finally hit the ground.  The jolt was just enough for the starling to break free and spiral away, obviously having trouble with its damaged wing.

Jane rushed out the french doors as she saw this happening, and the squirrel ran off when it saw her coming.  The other starling had plummeted to the ground from the bird feeder.  It had twitched a few times, but by the time Jane picked it up, it was motionless.

Jane was livid.  She had never been so mad at another living creature before.  She resolved to go buy a BB gun after work and make sure if that squirrel ever came around again, it would never hurt another bird.

Evil French Clowns

People who are afraid of clowns have even more reason to, now.  Teenagers in France are dressing up as clowns and terrorizing people.  It's not a joke!

The Bug-Out Movie

I've read the book, at some point I want to watch the movie:

Joel Skousen's Strategic Relocation

I still say, this late in the game, you should either stay where you are, or go home.  But if where you are is not home, or there are several places you feel at home, I think the book can help you decide.  Even if you're staying in place, he does a fine job of threat analysis for every area in these united States of America, so it can be useful for figuring out what to prepare for.

Related articles

• Map: Where You Don't Want to Be When It Hits the Fan
• Is It Time to Relocate? Top 100 Most Dangerous Cities in the USA in 2013
• Joel Skousen: Strategic Relocation, Feature Length Film, the Link

The Man With The (Peak-Oil Business) Plan

James M. Dakin has quite a blog, posting basically daily Monday through Friday.  Pedaling to Work was a particularly notable entry.  He has some great ideas for running a bicycle-based business to prepare for collapse.

Make a Simple Solar Oven

This is a pretty well illustrated guide to making a double-wall solar oven using simple materials:
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-a-Simple-Cardboard-Solar-Oven/?ALLSTEPS

Then They Mock You

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Mahatma Gandhi
There Are Now Approximately 3 Million Preppers In The United States, Why Are They Hated So Much?

How Solar Is Killing Fossil Fuels

Yes, you read that right:

The Price of Solar Power by Luis de Sousa on TheOilDrum.com

The critical paragraph in the entire article:

A perfect concurrency market with a marginal cost of zero is something totally outside the standard study and practice in economics. It is the reason why spot electricity prices collapse during sunny summer days or why during autumn storms there can even be negative prices. These are all symptoms of a market whose price will get closer and closer to zero the larger the number of renewable energy systems connected.

Of course, this is not profitable for electrical generation of any kind.

Wake up, people!

Just because there wasn't a cataclysm yesterday doesn't mean this isn't TEOTWAWKI.  The thing about "the end of the world as we know it" is that sometimes the changes accumulate slowly enough that we don't realize it.  Try to think back how your life was 13 years ago.  Imagine you had climbed into a bunker on December 31, 1999 and came out today.  Would this be a world you recognize at all?

If you don't see the apocalypse, maybe that's because you're one of the zombies....

How Obamacare Can Reduce Unemployment

Okay, follow closely.  Let's say you have some work that needs done that requires 120 person-hours a week.  Originally you might have hired 2 people to work 60 hours a week.  Then after overtime became an issue, you hired another person and cut everyone back to 40 hours a week.  Then came benefits for full time employees, so you went to 4 people working 30 hours a week.  Now with Obamacare, you would have to provide health insurance for people working 30 hours a week, so you go to 6 people working 20 hours a week.

Of course, this only works in jobs where there is a ready supply of new employees.  Those industries that can't hire readily just have to adjust to what they can afford, and those are the ones that publicly announce layoffs.  The hiring from Obamacare is more in low-skill service work, which goes relatively unnoticed.  Of course, there is no more money being paid to employees, so it's not really helping the economy, but it makes Obama look good.

So, the trend I expect to be reported over the coming months is a mild drop in the unemployment rate with a sharp increase in the underemployment rate, i.e., people who want to work full time but only have part time jobs.

A Treasure Trove of Survival Information

Okay, I know the whole theory is kind of hokey, and if it's not, it's a bit late now, but with over 14 GB of PDF files, this looks like a bountiful source of information:

Pole Shift Survival Information

I haven't had a chance to really go through it, I suspect there is a major overlap with some other source(s).  Glancing over the directory structure there seems to be a good variety of information, and looking at a couple of the PDFs they look detailed enough to be useful.

Captain Dave's Survival Guide

I recently came across a very interesting e-book entitled "Captain Dave's Survival Guide".  What amazes me is that he has the whole thing for available for free on his website.  I have only read a few pages so far, but it easily looks as good as the ones I see advertised everywhere for $20-$40.  Of course, he apparently doesn't spend the money advertising, so I wanted to let people know.

Why Shale Oil Works in the Short Run

Matt Badiali wrote a useful article, "Don't Believe This Shale Oil Argument... It'll Cost You", on The Growth Stock Wire.  Much of it is hyper-optimistic about the prospects of shale oil, but towards the middle there is a very useful analysis:

The Eagle Ford is one of the largest shale oil fields in the country. According to one company operating there, it costs $5.5 million to drill an oil well in the Eagle Ford.  

 

The wells have an estimated ultimate recovery of about 438,000 barrels of oil. Let's assume the company will get $85 per barrel (slightly below today's price) and that it costs $15 per barrel to move it. That means the company earns $70 per barrel in profit.

 

In short, the well pays for itself after 78,571 barrels... in about six months of production. After that, it becomes like an annuity. It's a risk-free profit. At $85 per barrel, it works out to a return of 4.6-to-1 on the money.

 Now, the numbers he doesn't crunch is that 78,000 is 18% of 438,000, so if production is linear the well would run dry in 33 months.  So yeah, shale oil is quite profitable, for now, but that doesn't say a lot for it's long term prospects.

A Different Spin

The IEA published an annual report recently that projects that the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia by 2020 in production of oil and become a net exporter by 2030.  There has been a lot of commentary on this, one side saying that this disproves peak oil and we can continue merrily along, the other saying these projections are wishful thinking.  I can foresee a quite probable scenario where the US surpasses Saudi Arabia as the latter's oil wells start pumping out water on the steep edge of the decline, and the US becomes a net exporter of oil because the dollar is no longer the reserve currency for the world and we need to sell oil for hard currency and can't afford to use the oil ourselves.

Feel The Breeze, Smell The Manure

"Israel’s outgoing civil defense chief predicts monthlong war, 500 dead after strike on Iran" on the Washington Post

Counterfeits and Knockoffs

Dan on BladeReviews.com has an interesting rant on "YouTube’s Counterfeit Culture".  I think there is an important distinction between counterfeits, which claim to be a certain brand, and knockoffs, that only look and work like it.  If something is truly innovative in how it works or looks, the creator should protect it with a patent or a design patent.  If not, then cheap imitations are okay, as long as you know what you are getting.  Nonessential things you can afford to skimp on.  Stuff that you are relying on to survive, you want to know you have the best quality possible.

Inflation AND Deflation

People involved in the financial world are worried about deflation, people involved in the real world are worried about inflation.  Guess what?  They're both right.  The value of paper assets is way out of proportion to the value of real assets.  The way that gets correct is for paper assets to fall in price and/or the prices of real goods to rise.  The last couple times this happened the process ended when the price of gold was about equal to the price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  Since we're at around $1500 an ounce for gold and $12000 for the DJIA, we have a long way to go.