It's all in the book

I have been answering a lot of questions on Yahoo and some of them are coming from the research I did to write "What Money Can't Buy". Take the price of gasoline or what the next big stock is going to be. I have educated guesses as to what those are and where they are going. The book looks like it is going to be an ongoing project. I got so involved in the work, it is hard to turn to other things. I was following Bucky Fuller's ideas at the start about the promise of hydrogen, only to see massive breakthroughs and changes in that one area alone. Solar panels and wind generators have also undergone a huge leap forward. Nanotech is finally getting past being wet behind the ears. Alternative sources like geo-thermal as being seriously looked into. This is an exciting time folks

Exciting times does not come without a price. The price I see we will all have to pay is a total money system colapse. In the end the world currency maybe Hong Kong $'s or Yen or Euros. As I am typing this I am praying that I am wrong. The timelines are skewed and the data coming in says we are screwed and governments all over the world can't even get together to do the minimal least( The Kyoto accord). The stupidity and greed I have read about during this grueling timeperiod, forces me into a survivalist mode of thinking. My girlfriend called me "Mr. Happy" or "Mr. Joyfull" when I was discussing these things with her. Yes, they are depressing, but that is not my fault. Don't shoot the messenger.

The good news is there are several things you can do to stop my future from happening. I am writing a book about money and at the same time making notes for a second volume to go with "What Money Can't Buy". The good news is we can pull our butts out of the deep hole we have dug and get healthier while we are doing it. The good news is that it does not have to be as bad as I see it to be. I have hope. After going through thousands of pages online, I see individual states picking up the ball the feds dropped. Here in Canada I see individual provinces doing their best to meet and surpass Kyoto protocals. I see inventers freely giving their work away so it can not be squashed but big business interests. There is hope.

Another reason to see hope is in groups like freecycle. I belong to chathamkentfreecycle. It is a moderated group through Yahoo and it is for giving things to your community or receiving things from your community. No money is exchanged. But the item on the board once or twice and if it does not go, give it to Goodwill. This keeps items out of landfills and helps everyone's karma. Locally.

There is hope for us yet. The hint of how to survive a major trauma like a power failure or money failure is in the local community. Make your links with people now. Swap stuff or give it away, downsize, do more with less. How can someone steal from you if you are willing to give it to them? Think about that.

Michael J. Kaer, owner of www.2bitpixel.com

Battery-Free Flashlight



Here is a picture of the box and the flashlight I bought recently. I have been seeing these advertized all over the net and on Ebay. Being the type of person who A) loves gadgets and B) is an Electronic Technician and C) concerned with the environment, so any item that would cut down on throw away batteries is O.K. in my book and D) has lived through one of the worst power outages in North American History (so far!) and E) am a Survivalist Equipment Tester, I would like to give you my thoughts on this product so far.

It claims to float and be waterproof. I have not tested that as yet. It does claim to not need batteries to run. That is not strictly true, it does have a couple of small batteries to hold a charge that the system generates. To be truely Battery-Free, you would need a capacitor setup to store the charge or some other way of storing the charge. The light given off is bluish due to the type of LED ( Light Emmiting Diode) being used as the light source. You can read by it. It does get pretty strong for a small flashlight. I like another feature they do not show or talk about. When you charge it up and turn it on then set it on a flat surface(light beam down) it acts like a lantern since the cover is clear plastic.

I am torture-testing that feature as I type. I charged it up and turned it on face down. It has contnued to give light over 24 hours. I am trying to completely discharge the batteries to test the exact number of shakes needed for good light. This could take a while since most LED’s use very little power, a fraction of a volt, usually.

There is one caution I must give you about this type of lightsource. Since it uses a strong magnet and a coil to take advantage of Faraday’s law, it is strong enough to wipe out credit cards, debit cards, laptops, ipods..., take my word for it and keep it away from electronics and your wallet.

My conclusion so far- even with the limitations ( store it in a pouch or hang it from your neck) of keeping it away from electronic devices or credit cards, this is one item I plan on adding to my permanent equipment. It is not very expensive and the fact that you will not have to buy batteries for it, makes it a great bargain.

Michael J. Kaer, owner of www.2BitPixel.com
Ps. After I finshed this little article, I tested if it does indeed float and if it is waterproof. Yes it does float. I do not know how far down you can go diving with it, but it is waterproof. I forgot to tell you that it has a built in ring at the end to put a line through so you can easily wear it around your neck.
PPs.To make sure it is completely waterproof, I would take it apart and seal the lens on with silicone and silicone the on/off switch to the on position from the inside and add more to the outside of the switch. Then I would feel safe taking it diving.

I wrote this for my blog about money at http://moneythebook.blogspot.com and since it pertains to this blog, I thought I would a post it here too. That doubles my chance that someone reads it (which is the whole point of running a blog).


A worth of a thing...

Upon further research into this subject of money, I have come across different stories. Wait a minute; I was researching survival sites and this topic came up in a story. Now that I think about it money and survival have been linked often. I will not quote the story but it went something like this.
The man was talking about barter items and he asked what a box of nails was worth. In certain circumstances that box of nails would be worth their weight in gold , since gold would not be worth much, neither would silver. Maybe a trade for a bottle of alcohol or 2 cigarettes or some fresh fish. In a barter trade it depends on what the other person is holding, how badly you need (want) it and what you are willing to give up. If society broke down to the point of no transport trucks were transporting goods and a smoker had no access to nicotine, they may very well trade the box of nails for the a couple of smokes. A person brewing and distilling their own hooch, would gladly trade a bottle of the stuff if they had a leaky roof that needed fixing. I person who caught a whole mess of fish would be willing to part with a couple and the holder of the box of nails could be starving. Does this mean that a bottle of booze = a couple of smokes = a couple of fish? No! Yet under the right circumstances they very well could be. This story illustrates that in a trade or exchange the worth of the item depends on the needs of the two parties trading, therefore the worth of an item is flexible. Money is the same way. Since it is a token of worth and it has no intrinsic value (except as a piece of paper or a bit of metal) it flexes from day to day depending on what millions of transactions say it is worth. That is the simplified version anyway.

Right now I am willing to trade several months of research and hundreds of hours of writing in the form of two books for what? One of my needs are arrows or crossbow bolts and BB's. Well, with the money/credit system in place and still functional, I can have my books available 24 hours a day at www.mjk-private-income.com. A person wanting that valuable information can trade money in the form of digital bits directly into my paypal account. I can turn around and use those bits to ask someone who makes arrows or BB's to send me some and I will transfer some of those bits into their account. Everybody ends up happy.

Till next time...

Michael J. Kaer

I just re-read R.A.H.'s "Tunnel in the sky", one of his juvi's about a survival course for highschool kids gone very wrong. What was to be a 10 day outing at the most turned into a 2 year ordeal. Very interesting stuff. Robert is often quoted in many of the survival sites I go to. Speaking through his character Lazarus Long he says "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts,build a wall,set a bone,comfort the dying, take orders, give orders,cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (page 248-Time Enough For Love). Speaking of Survival sites, I downloaded the the survival bible #2, which is just a .pdf file with a few articles and hundreds of links to survival sites. Alot of the sites are no longer up and running, but a bunch of the die-hard sites are still in operation. Some of them have been going for 10 years, so they must be doing something right.

I was wondering why such a large amount of sites listed where not there. I know people get tired of running a site and just close it down if it is not making any money or giving any satifaction.In some cases I think many people have "bugged out" to their retreats after 9-11 and just stayed there. I have a 5 year plan in place to start the move. I am fixing up my house and plan on selling it in about 5 year's time. I life in a small city where I can't have an open fire (other than a BBQ) and there are a lot of restrictions on other activities I would like to do. I can't raise rabbits or chickens without the city raising a squack. I can't shoot an arrow or a BB gun for practice without attracting undue attention. I live in Canada, so gun ownership is frowned upon. I have a nice assortment of knives and practice with them indoors, while doing Tai Chi. I have a throwing knive I whould like to get provicient with that is in the same boat as the arrows and BB's. I need more land!

Here's my wish list of what I think I need. I can live on 5-20 acres if I have a bit of bush and a pond and some fruit trees on it. It would need to have well water and be located near a hill. It would need a small barn/workshop. I could live in a trailer for all I really care. My 17 footer would not be big enough. My main two crops would be sunflowers and hemp. I of course would put in a huge garden. I would like the hill to not be seen from the road because I would like to put one or more wind generators. If there is no hill I would set up a tower. The barn and the trailer would have as many solar panels on it as I can afford I would heat the barn and the trailer with a safe woodstove that can divert it's smoke to a smoke house next to it. Water pipes around the woodstove, then buried in the ground leading to the trailer and barn would bring heated water. I could tap some for hot water and the rest would heat the floors. With that much space I could have goats, rabbits and chickens as food and worms for bait and organic fertilizer. That is my simple outline of what I could set up as a self-sustaining farm. I figure that would be good enough for me and my girlfriend.

Any thoughts? I would like to hear them.
Michael.

Just a quick update on my bug-out kit. It is still not complete, but most of the stuff is there. I need to re-photocopy my ID and important papers. I found one of my 2 wind-up radio/flashlights. The battery booster is fully charged, and I have a 400 watt and a 600 watt inverter ready for hookup. I have 2 small solar panels and on larger one ready to work. What I would like to have is some more small, sealed 12 volt batteries. They are very expensive (still). This year I am planing on constructing a large battery from plans I got online. The cost of the larger solar panels are starting to come down. I saw a 15 watt on sale for $80.00 Canadian dollars. That is a good start, but we need them to come down alot more before people with buy them in a large quantity.

That is all for today. Let me know what your plans are. Do you have 3 months worth of food? I would seriously start now!

Michael.

I wrote this for my other blog, but it needs to be in this one as well. Since not everyone reads all my blogs, I have increased my chances that you have read this by 100% :)

At about 11:15 PM March 1,2006, I got a wake up call. It came in the form of a total power black out. Well not total, downtown had power, but one whole side of the city was in blackness. I ALWAYS keep a flashlight in my kitchen window. The trick is to walk in total darkness without killing yourself or knocking things over. Silly me forgot that I had a fully charged penlight close to the lightswitch in the computer-room.

I had a fully charged laptop I could write on and do some reading if I wanted. I had looked forward to a nice warm bed and a book, but that did not happen. I found a few other flashlights and took stock of what I had and what I needed to do. I checked the emergency jumpstarter. It had not been plugged in for some time, so it had almost no charge. I have a small solar panel in my window that keeps a charge on 2-12 volt batteries and I have an inverter to power anything that is under 600 watts. It was working fine. I looked around for my emergency windup radio/flashlight. I have two of them and I could not find either one. I think one is at my girlfriend's place in our camping equipment and the other is outside in my trailer. I had another small battery powered radio/flashlight that used to be attached to my bike. It's charged and working.
I have about 3 months worth of emergency food and enough water for up to a week. If this had been a "Bugout Scenario" I would not have had all my gear in one bag to grab. I have been working with my girlfriend to get her's ready since she would be on the frontlines in any disaster ( she works for public health). I got her a nice, compact windup radio as part of her birthday present. I like to get little odds and ends for her kit, and have been neglecting mine in the process. It is nice one of us will be fully prepared. I have gone through my bag and I know I need at least another pair of underwear and socks, maybe 2 more, they do not take up much room. I have no clothes in there and I have not updated all my ID or copies of my important papers. Other than that I am not in too bad a spot. With a little work over the next few days I can have most of my kit totally ready. I need to fill up my fanny pack as well. I need to choose just one extra book, something small but practical and it may have a few stories in it. Any suggestions? With that I will end this post.

Michael J. Kaer, President of Kaer Enterprises (.com),www.mjk-private-income.com, www.2bitpixel.com and www.mikesworms.com
Ps. I am just finding out just how much you can shove into those Altoids tins if you wrap them in rubber bands after!