Comments

Episode-1470- Listener Calls for 11-21-14 — 17 Comments

  1. Thanks Jack for the answer. Mark Shepard had a very similar answer. He said protect your high value trees and plant willow all around the pond. Let the beaver build damns and create wildlife habitat.

    We are going to let him stay if he can work with us we have a good riparian barrier so there is alot for him already before he gets into our planted trees. I would be happier to see him if we did not already have a pond in place, but it is what it is, for now.

    • I just listened to this question, and had to say I would leave the beavers be. Rarely will you see more than I at a time, but there is more than 1. We always have a family of beavers in one of our man made ponds. If you set out to exterminate them, you will have your work cut out for you, and next year you will likely start all over. They impound so much water that I would have to argue that they can be as effective as swales for hydrating the land, with zero input or labor from you.

      The only time we would kill any was when they would start burrowing into our earthen dam. When we did feel compelled to take them out I would wait for a clear moonlit night, scoped 22 and a lawn chair. Find a position where the moon is shining on the waters surface, pop them in the head as they cruise past on the surface. ( thats when we realized we didn’t have a beaver, we had 6). By the next spring there was a new family of beaver, who didn’t burrow in the dam and we left them be.

      I read a book about when Canada was having issues with bad spring floods, followed by droughts for summer and fall. They reintroduced beaver which had been trapped out. No more floods, no more droughts.

    • Beaver…
      Yummy! I got a beaver this year while hunting. I skinned it for it’s pelt, but I since am also ethical hunter who eats (almost) all of my kills. I found a great recipe online for beaver stew. If you get a beaver that lives in clean clear water, I would not hesitate to have a fine meal. The meat is actually very tender and cooks like beef. An adult beaver will yield about 10 lbs. of meat, it was a very hearty stew.

  2. I bought the theme song from uTunes about a year ago????????, so it may still be available there also.

  3. Jack, I brought my worms in two weeks ago and have been dumping my coffee grounds in every day, and I noticed in the last few days, about six or seven worms around the lid of the tote, almost like an escape. I wonder if that’s it?

    • Now be careful. Your worms prefer a cool compost. An ideal temperature range of between 55 – 95 degrees. The coffee grounds, with the addition of carbon materials for bedding, can produce a hotter compost. Be careful not to fry those buddies.

      Also, the eggshell grounds are great at helping break down the things considered “no no’s” in your worm bins; ie. excessive breads, oils, fats, meats, onions, citrus, leftovers, etc.

  4. Coffee grounds are, at worst, only very slightly acidic. There’s plenty of research on this. There are probably other good reasons to not add too much coffee grounds (from what I read, I’ve yet to try a worm bin).

    But the most important thing is, take all the coffee you can get! It’s a fantastic source of nitrogen. As Jack said, you can add it directly to the soil, although the nitrogen becomes available to the plants only very slowly, as soil microbes digest it.

    Much better is to compost it. Just making a regular compost pile (wet it down, turn a couple of times a few weeks apart), coffee works better than anything I’ve used. You’ll just want to add a carbon source. Shredded paper from your office is perfect. Here’s a guy who composted roughly 800 pounds of coffee/filters with roughly 200 pounds of mostly shredded paper: http://arlingtonheet.org/2011/11/fast-urban-compost-saving-energy-outside-the-home/

    He links to the compost report from the UMass Soil Lab at the bottom. Check it out: his compost had a ph of 6.9 and a whopping 3.48% nitrogen. That’s approaching chicken manure levels of nitrogen! A home gardener can easily get all the NPK needed from the local coffee shop.

    • Ben, please confirm. With Thanksgiving coming up you will probably have a lot of egg shells from boiled eggs. First, be sure to use the mineral rich water the eggs were boiled in on your compost pile. 2, collect all of your egg shells and put them in an oven save bowl and bake them for a while (put them in the oven as it cools after cooking dinner). Then put them in a coffee ginder before they go to the compost bin. You can also use to keep slugs away.

  5. What that guy said about video games is spot on, as early as 2000 I was playing online games when I only had dial up internet, leveling up my toons to max and selling them on E-bay for $500…I did it over and over for years in my spare time, before that game was out dated, there is no doubt you can do it today in online games…not counting gold scammers

  6. On states and virtual nations..

    A 100k person virtual nation, with a median US income, is earning $5.4 BILLION annually.

    But their power doesn’t end there.. look at, something like the CAC. How much will each American be taxed to ensure that that resource is available in times of disaster? Yeah, $0.

    Why is that? Because the CAC members are DOING, instead of settling into the couch for another sitcom. Not ALL the time, but enough of the time to create/provide a fantastic resource for.. not the CITIZENS of the US (state).. but for their FELLOW AMERICANS (nation).

    IMO Social Power comes from providing the needs of ‘the crowd’. And this is where VNs truly gather their power. Money is just a symbol for value created, but its not the only one. And money isn’t always rewarded to a value provider directly.

    Example: How many of you have written a check to google for providing you with internet search services? To facebook for hooking you up with long lost friends? To Khan Academy for teaching you math? (oh wait, isn’t that a STATE function that requires taxation!)

    This kind of goes with Episode 1468, but I’ll stuff it in here:

    The more resources you are SURROUNDED BY the more secure you are. A lot of survivalists are introverts, looking out for ‘me and mine’ but we need to be building RELATIONSHIPS and ALLIANCES.

    So, if your not getting the why, here’s two Monday scenarios:
    You have 100 gallons of water stored in your basement. No one else in your city has any water stored, and an earthquake just took out the local reservoir. It was a big quake so help is going to be a long time coming, what do you do?

    Do you see the problem? You don’t want 100 gallons, 1000 gallons or 10k gallons of water while everyone else has none. You want EVERY PERSON in your city to have some water stored. Same with food, same with energy, the same with security, sanitation, etc… and for the same reason.

    You want EVERY PERSON to be onboard.

    Now the reason I’m sticking this is here is the VN comments.. this is what a VN is, people coming together to do something without the approval or blessing of ‘the powers that be’. People just DOING IT.

    Not yapping about it, debating it, complaining about it not being done, figuring out how to make someone else pay for it, or tricking someone else into doing it.

    Just getting off their ass, and making it happen.. because it matters.

    Is there anything YOU can do, where you are, with NO ONES PERMISSION, that matters to you and your family? To your community? To your state? To your nation? [at none of these levels I am NOT saying ‘the government of your..’ I’m talking about YOUR PEOPLE]

  7. Thank you, Jack for all you do and the show. I’ve been looking for the song and couldn’t find it until you posted it on your website. I used a phone application (Ringtone Maker- Android) to make a ring tone off of the MP3 you posted.

    Thanks Again,
    MSB Member John

  8. RE: Contracting and Mobility

    LOL yes I actually have been called by up to 3 different recruiters for the same position, and in two instances I got called for the same position and company THAT I WAS ALREADY WORKING IN (apparently many only scan for keywords and don’t really read the resume, perhaps part of that ‘cutthroat competition’ to act fast and fill positions that you were talking about). Actually my current position started with a call from such a recruiter some 18 months ago as a contract-to-hire gig, and most other new hires in that span were the same so it was clear that the company in question wanted to “test the waters” with new hires this way before committing to bringing them in as company employees. Pretty sensible strategy to me.

    Anyway, I knew you would come up with something or some new angle I didn’t think of. I really like the concept of working several clients or business ventures through the same work process / job function…. it’s a great way to have redundancy of income so one can stay in one place and doesn’t have to chase jobs. It lends itself easiest to IT and technical work, but I can think of some ways of making it work for other fields. Guess that sort of confirms my suspicion that entrepreneurship in one form or another is one key strategy to enable settling down to put down roots. My own days of relocating frequently for better opportunities are (hopefully) coming to an end when going into business for ourselves next summer, but we are still looking for secondary business opportunities especially for those in our family that are still staying in the US. It just felt to me that this trend was something that could be capitalized on, and I’d found that mobility and keeping my ‘stuff’ down to a minimum was a winning strategy for me thus far so I suspected people would move towards that as things get rougher. With people moving around more some new niches should open up worth acting on…. maybe furnished micro-apartments, relocation/apartment-finding services, internet forums/websites catering to mobile workers, etc.

    Thanks Jack!
    – Nick

  9. Hi all. Jack, thanks for the shout out on the podcast today! Im glad I took the chance and became the crepe myrtle tea guinea pig for your listeners. I’ve been drinking it regularly, and have noticed that im not as hungry as I used to be, my sugar cravings have decreased, and I’ve dropped 10 pounds. Crepe myrtle tea by itself is till a learned taste, but it smells and tastes a lot better by adding cinnamon. I like the cinnamon better than adding honey. Keep up the great work!

  10. I thought the bit about video games and virtual nations was really interesting. I occasionally play a game called League of Legends, and one of these things I find most interesting about it is that the community is self policing.

    In most online games, if another player is behaving inappropriately towards you, you have to go to a moderator to have the issue dealt with. These moderation systems are usually operated by the company that created the game.

    In League of Legends, players submit reports of inappropriate behavior, which are then reviewed by a tribunal of other players who decide how an issue should be resolved.