↓
 

Episode-843- Listener Feedback for 2-20-12

The Survival Podcast Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (21.6MB)

It is time for another show based 100% on emails the audience has sent in to jack at thesurvivalpodcast.com  Remember to submit content for a show like this.

Please realize I get hundreds of submissions a week and can only get about a dozen on the weekly feedback show.  That said I do read them all and often put out many of them on facebook and twitter even if I don’t put them on the show.

The best way to make sure I read your question or comment is to put “question for jack” or something similar in the subject line of your email.  This will also help to prevent accidental spam sorting.

Join Me Today as We Discuss…

  • Fight depression with dirt, really
  • Thoughts for  when you’re stuck in an “underwater” home
  • Survival sleeping means no snoring think about it
  • Is it really that hard to grow fruit trees
  • If Iceland defaulted and went on why can’t Greece do the same
  • More on downward class migration
  • Will gas hit 5 bucks this summer, will it ever go down much after that
  • Wood mulch and termites
  • Using “gum” species of trees for hugulkulture
  • Is Syria using nerve gas on its own people
  • Is there a place where even a non interventionist should step up to intervene
  • A new way to see the monetary value of a garden
  • Fortune 500 Giant Chesapeake Energy has a massive community garden
  • Should you loose sleep over Fukushima right now, NO!
  • The Starbucks Protest is “ongoing” so my spending of 2 dollar bills we be as well
  • Best southern states for year round growing
  • Why does bottled water have a expiration date, because NJ is run by idiots!
  • Get a job or join the Army or go to College or What?
  • Jefferson County a text book example of municipal bankruptcy and its consequences

Additional Resources for Today’s Show

Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK and you might hear yourself on the air.

Comments

Episode-843- Listener Feedback for 2-20-12 — 29 Comments

  1. Jack,
    thanks for taking the time to answer my email about my mortgage, you were pretty much online with what I was thinking. My current monthly note it $870, not $650 (currently at 6.25% interest) and that makes a huge difference.
    No, I will not be a landlord, some people can do it, I can’t.

    Thanks again, love the show and keep up the good work!

    • We’re in a similar situation ourselves ($97K owed, equal houses selling for $40K). We went the landlord route renting each bedroom out (5 bedroom house), but we have to go to an attorney tomorrow to start the eviction process for 1 of the tenants. There’s been other problems as well with other tenants. Our only other debts are student loans that we are paying off this year.

      We are leaning now towards either the short sale or default option. If you do either option after this year, expect a large tax bill on the for the forgiven debt. There is tax regulation in effect this year that will offset the tax bill.

  2. Dirt is good for you? Maybe that’s why God made us without shoes. If all the nerves endings to all the organs are in the feet, then those may be fed through walking barefoot? hmmm?

    • I am a Left brain guy in the IT industry and even I think your on to something here. As a result I am raising my children without shoes, and going without myself, as much as possible.

    • I don’t know about anyone else, but the first thing my kids do when they come in the house is take off their shoes. Once they drop their bags and jackets, the socks come off – even during the coldest time of the year (sub-zero isn’t uncommon most winters). Look to Children for what is natural behavior as they have been less tainted than the rest of us have by society and “civilization.”

  3. Jack:
    Michael Ruppert or Richard Heinberg once remarked on the power of a gallon of gasoline, basically the story was somewhat like this:

    Take one gallon of gasoline, put it in an average car, pack as many friends as possible in it; and drive until empty. The agreed upon number was five people for 30 miles. The cost, was 3 bucks, (at the time of the story, I think)

    Now go to Thailand, approach a rickshaw driver and say:
    “For 3 bucks , will you haul five of my friends for 30 miles”?

    Even at 100 bucks a gallon, I can drive my RAV4 into town, fill it to the max with goods/food/lumber, even tow a trailer with enough swag to last me a few months.

    No alternative energy has the power to replace fossil fuels

    • I think in Canada it works out to 4.72, since a U.S gallon is 3.78 litres. Cdn gallon is 4.54 litres.

      We are paying 1.25 a litre, some places 1.50 a litre

  6. Great quote related to the dirt/happiness segment.

    “One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.”

    -Leo Tolstoy

  8. http://www.constitutionpreservation.org/constitution-preservation/cspoa-bill-rights-presentation <Michael Badnarik is one super guy. I've been to his class and we stay in touch a bit. Please view the Constitution presentation in his link. It's fantastic!
    Jack….thank you for supporting Ron Paul! Moody "Christian" Radio will NOT mention his name. I emailed them about it and they don't believe he is a suitable candidate so he has been eliminated from their discussions. EGADS. I told them that I will never listen to their station again as long as I live.

  9. Producing fruit s not always as easy as Jack makes it out to be. The important thing is to observe your tree and take note of the problems. Every situation is different, for example, I have a difficult time growing any stone fruit. Plums, peaches, apricots succumb to the plum curcurlio. But someone a few miles from me may not have a problem. Jack’s permaculture approach is important because if you can observe your trees as they get older and begin to produce, you can take the necessary preventative measures (fungicide for diseases) or curative measures (insecticides for bugs) or other method of interplanting etc. Personally I choose organic remedies. So observe your plants and from there seek out a solution from either the internet, your local independent garden center, or other source. Gather all the info and make your plan.

  10. Oh, I forgot to mention, another solution to spraying apples and pears are fruit bags. There are a few styles out there, but the one I use is the apple maggot bags from Raintree Nursery. They are like the nylon footies used when trying on shoes and the are slipped over the fruit when young. It excludes insects and works pretty well, as long as you get them on before the bug does its damage. There are tons of options and it really isn’t that hard. There is a learning curve just like anything else.

  11. Water is not 100% free of things. Nor is the plastic bottle 100% non-permable. In the EMS and EM world we have to check the expiration dates on our sterile water and IV as well as our emergency drinking water. Many times i’ve been cleaning out a back room or a back up wagon that has not been used and found water bottles with little floties in them.

    Some other reasons is that water will pick up a bad taste if in a bottle for a long time, it is “safe” but tastes bad, an expiration date reduces that possibility.

    Since most bottled water comes from municipal sources, it contains fluoride which does expire.

    There are two main types of sterilization that all food and drink manufacturers use. The first is the use of peracetic acid that gives an instant kill to most pathogens (bugs that make you ill). The second is the use of steam. Holding a steam temperature of above 120 degrees in the product line for 15 minutes will kill virtually all pathogens. However, some bacteria form spores which are virtually indestructible and can last for millions of years.

    Packaging deterioration is the other reason for the “Best By” Date.

    (Please do not make the mistake of thinking that “Bottled Water” means pure, sterile, perfect water. It may surprise you to know that there is very little regulation concerning ‘bottled water’. For example, it is common practice to label the bottle with such things as ” Spring Water” or “Mountain fresh” while the water is actually taken directly from municipal sources! Look for yourself at the fine print and see. )

  12. I’ve tried mouth guards and have found that the brainpad brand with the holes in the full mouth guard style from the sporting goods store work well enough with my sleep apnea and costs far less.

  13. Thanks for the good advice to the young man who wanted to know about joining the service. Only one more tiny bit of advice. Save 10% of your paycheck in a separate account or mattress that you do NOT touch. It is your retirement money. If you start at a young age and are dedicated to that savings then you’ll be okay later in life. Discipline is the key there.

  14. In re the young man who wondered about military vs college enrollment, I totally agree with you. After 12 years at a university teaching many ex-military folk I find those students to be very project-oriented as compared with the average student.

    Another thought to pass along to this young man regarding housing is this link to a YouTube video about a 16-year-old who build a “tiny house” to guarantee he’d have no mortgage as an adult. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXDu2U-CmkI

    I though this episode covered an especially nice range of topics.

  15. Great show, Jack.

    I’d like to second your advice regarding military service and/or college. I did both for the wrong reasons, and hated nearly every minute of it. Although only a three year hitch, I was miserable the entire time of my service. Even had I chosen a more suitable MOS (infantry was not it!), I doubt it would have been any better. I simply did not belong.

    Likewise, college was a lame excercise in “because ….” “Because it’s what Mom and Pop wanted, because it’s what you did if you didn’t want to do ‘real’ work, because I bought it with three years of my life …, yadda yadda ….” At least with college you can walk away with the debt. Walk away from your military contract, you’ll never be free.

    Looking back now, I wish I had just gone homesteading on land my parents owned. It was a kind of fantasy then, a daydream of youth. I knew nothing of how to do it, only that I wanted to. It’s my land now, but in many ways I’m farther from going there today than I was twenty years ago, although I now have some idea(s) of how to go about it.

    I have great respect for any who serve. I have great loathing for the simplistic glorification of military service offered up by the media and society in general, and especially for politicians who use our soldiers like cheap plastic pawns. Know why you’re there before you get there.

    Thanks, and rock on!

    PS Imho, you don’t ever have to apologize for going long. 🙂

  16. To the guy who was worrying about Fukushima related radiation exposure:
    While radiation that is traceable to this event will be detectable for a very very very long time, it is now a negligible risk outside of japan and the near oceans around it. You will literally be getting more exposure from *granite* (think fancy kitchen bench tops) by this point.

  17. I did find one example of why bottled water has an expiration date. ( still listening as I write)
    I bought a 12 litre “brick” of water, and put it in my preps.
    A year and a half later I was wondering where a thin puddle was coming from. After ruling out the freezer that happened to be living in the same room, I traced it back to the impossible. The plastic brick of water that had sat there unopened.
    There had developed a 12 mm long split in the seam of the molded plastic bottle.
    And for that brand, that was why there was an expiration date on that water.

    • I’ve had quite bad luck with storing the 2.5 gallon jugs. I used to have some in my fridge just to displace air and reduce the cooling requirement for each door open/close, but now that I am not alone in my house that went away and I set it on a shelf and forgot about it. then it cracked along a seam and leaked everywhere.

  18. Intel Corporation up here in Oregon also has a nice community garden program. I am friends with someone who is part of the non-profit company who runs it.

    They seem to always have people working on the raised beds out in the parking lots.

    I don’t think it’s quite as rare as some thing, just something that is not advertised a lot.

  19. On Iceland, Greece, inflation, default and currencies: unless I misheard you it seemed like you were saying that part of the reason Greece couldn’t default like Iceland did is that they don’t have a national currency any longer, so they can’t debase the Euro. But aren’t there really two means of defaulting for a country: “honest default” by saying you can’t pay which doesn’t require a national currency, and default by “inflation” by printing a bunch of worthless money to pay off a debt? And the latter option, default by inflation really only “works” if your debt is also denominated in your own currency, which I tend to hear as being a somewhat uniquely American situation, with the dollar still as the reserve currency. A quick search didn’t turn up make it clear to me whether or not Icelandic debt was denominated in the Krona or not, but safely assuming that it is/was not, isn’t it true that Greece’s situation is not that much different from a currency standpoint? Iceland with a national currency but debt likely denominated in foreign ones they can’t control, vs. Greece with debt denominated in a regional currency they can’t control. Greece could legitimately default and try and work out some sort of deal with their creditors, it would just take the political will to do so, and the stomach to deal with the fallout and consequences. Which, I’m sure they are lacking in.

  20. Jack, I only got to Monday’s show now, and I know you were just trying to make a point, but Greece is not the EU’s California – it’s more like their Louisiana. Usually poor and usually poorly managed. The EU’s California and Texas (in economic heft, not in any other ways) would be Germany and France.

  21. On uses for Eucalypt: You can grow shiitake on Eucalypt (and surely some other useful, edible fungi).

↑