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Episode-1303- Listener Feedback for 2-17-14 — 30 Comments

  1. Olin bought Winchester in 1931. They sold the firearms business to a group of employees in 1980. Olin owns the name and licenses it to the firearms business.

  2. Topic Time Markers

    [5:22] An opportunity to go to the Battery Bank Workshop at a discount*
    [7:32] Is the value of your time a “self delusion”
    [18:53] Can anything good at all ever come from GMO
    [32:44] Creating a spring that produces 13,000 gallons a week with terraces
    [35:19] Remington heads for Alabama in a Walk to Freedom
    [44:55] Spacing of support and productive trees in a system
    [52:19] Planting trees on a dam wall, I say don’t do it
    [56:33] Tips for protecting your email address online
    [1:02:46] New standards for Permaculture teachers, will anyone care, should they?
    [1:20:30] Thoughts on locating a gas line when the utility company won’t do it for you
    [1:31:02] More on the changing factors in educating our children

    * – Added by me

  3. Jack’s Permaculture hippie rant made me spit out my coffee more than once. Funny aside, the analysis was spot on. “hippie yaya mudfairy BS.” Too funny… tell us how you really feel 😉

  4. Jack, I agree that New York is probably screwed. However, there are still a lot of good people here working to restore their home state. Wouldn’t it be great to fix it instead of giving up. Maybe a lost cause but I will continue to fight to save my home.

    • I’m writing from Illinois here so I’m kind of talking to myself…

      What are you fighting? Yes, it would be great if I could stand up and fight to stop the flood. But the water will win. There is nothing to fight. No one bad guy to take care of. It isn’t a matter of electing the right people as legislation won’t stop the flooding either. The water is coming.

      Sometimes we just have to move to higher ground. And, though I haven’t heard it mentioned here, higher ground may include having a plan outside of the US.

      If you don’t like the rising water analogy, insert zombie. There is never a leader zombie to shoot and legislative action is either ineffective or just too late to stop the spread.

      How about a big truck? You could stand up to the semi speeding toward you but the best option is probably just to move out of the way then help clean up the wreckage in its wake.

  5. Jack one aspect of why Remington is doing this the way they are is probably the fact that the NY plant is union- United Mine Workers to be exact. When you have a union deeply embedded into your business you have to be very, very careful about how you do and word things. If you actually “move” a job there would be a lot of trouble, and perhaps a requirement that the new plant automatically go union or big payoffs to the person whose job was moved. But an “expansion” due to great business, followed by a “reduction” due to slowing sales, is another story. It is very tricky, and one false move and the Feds via the NLRB will be all over you. Odds are Freedom Group has a bunch of highly paid labor lawyers orchestrating it all.

    I find it quite ironic that the NY plant is represented by the United Mine Workers, who as a union steadfastly support all the politicians and policies that will be what runs those jobs away. The workers there quite literally are funding a push to end their own jobs with the money taken out of every paycheck to support the union…

    • Tim, New York is not a right to work state. If you want to work for Remington you are forced to join the union. I think that if they had a choice the workers would not be union. I live very close to the Remington plant and I believe the Remington employees are some of the better people in this state. Unfortunately it is the government and the people in other parts of the state that are voting for these clowns that are the real problem. We are working on that problem where I am. Hopefully we can make a difference. I actually turned down a job at Remington because I refuse to be part of a union.

      • I can sympathize with someone with few choices, but as for the workers at Remington not wanting the union, even in NY if they wanted to they could hold a vote and decertify the union. The fact that they don’t says either the majority like it, or don’t dislike enough to do anything about it.

        • VW employees in Chattanooga rejected the UAW. I loved hearing the VW folks say that they didn’t need or want a wedge between them and their employer.

  6. There was a game show on Fox a couple of years ago called Are You Smarter Than 5th Grader?

    In the entire history of the show, out of all the doctor, lawyers, businessman, celebrities, and various other successful people that competed on the program only two contestants ever won the million dollar prize.

    One was a Kathy Cox a superintendent of public schools in Georgia.

    The other was George Smoot a professor at Berkley.

    The only two successful people that ever one the grand prize were both teachers.

    Just goes to show how really relevant all that stuff they teach you in public school really is.

    The only place that knowledge has any real world use is in the educational system itself.

  7. I taught for four years (ending 3yrs ago) in a very similar situation as Jacks class. I taught a full Oceanography coarse, which kids got a small taste of in the freshman Earth Science course. Oceanography was an elective science class with no standardized, state provided, end of year test.

    So in an area with the largest shipyards in the world, I was able to put a small tote full of water in front of the kids and get them to make boats out of aluminum foil. They would test them to see how many pennies they would hold etc.

    I say all that to say, my Juniors and Seniors were so burnt out by school at that point, they couldn’t even get excited about getting to play with water. After two weeks of labs and going over and over the concepts they could not find the volume of simple shapes even if given the formulas (like surface area x thickness). Then asking them to find the weight of the simple shapes with the density provided… you might as well ask them to design a space shuttle.

    Unfortunately our kids are loosing the ability to solve even the simplest problems.

    • I said all that to say Jack is right, education will change. I also have a newly turned 3yr old, and a soon to be 5yr old. With a small amount of time using educational apps on various devices they can learn the things they are currently interested in. Interest is the key, if a person doesn’t care about the topic it doesn’t matter how well its presented.

  8. Jack. I was glad to hear your skepticism on dousing. That aside, you told the guy to turn off his gas meter if he cut the line. It might be better to turn it off before he starts digging as a precauction. Just saying.

  9. For additional bit of verification, the PDC at Ben’s place this year was definitely what you described. “Hippies doing hippy things”, “responsible people going to bed early”, and people talking about guns/survivalism around the camp fire.

    Literally explained exactly what occured. Excellent PDC mixture as well. Everybody has something different to share, everybody has something different/new to add, and everybody more or less gets along just fine.

  10. Might be a little late for this but RE: Geoff Lawton – Permaculture
    I was wondering if he would consider letting past students audit the course. I took it last year through your deal here – I’ve been watching his latest videos – which are outstanding and in the comments (of his videos) he mentioned that they were providing more interesting content for future classes.
    Could you ask him if he’d let us audit the new course?
    Regarding the comments about New York – I enjoy reading Herrick Kimbals’ blog he had an interesting post on the ‘state’ of things in New York
    http://thedeliberateagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-freedom-contest-olahoma-vs-new-york.html

  11. Such an awesome show!!
    Again……so much information……
    Really good stuff you covered!
    Thanks Jack!!

  12. Two notes.
    In regards to what your time is worth, in economics it’s referred to as opportunity cost; the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. The opportunity cost of changing your own oil is the inability to do something else.

    Second, to avoid spam email there is an extension for both Firefox and chrome called maskme. It’s free and it will create a temp email that is forwarded to your real address. If you get spam, just click spam within the message and maskme blocks that address. Real easy to setup and use.

  13. Jack, I was kind of apprehensive to listen to this episode after seeing that you were going to talk about Remington’s expansion down in Alabama, mainly because it seems you go on these rants without taking into consideration that there are many patriots up here and that EVERY state has their own internal issues even your great state of Texas. I am a New Yorker and I am a Patriot. I am a veteran of Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan and after my 20 years in the service I chose to return to my families home town in Upstate New York. We are as American as they come, some may even call us Rednecks or Hillbillies. I can guarantee you that WE do not deserve what our current state government is doing and WE did not vote them in. There are thousands of us up here that are currently having to live what the idiots down in NYC voted in. Do not think that we are just idly standing by, no we are not abandoning our homes and heading south, we are getting voters registered, getting people informed, passing resolutions in our towns and counties, and in the near future you will see that we are not going to comply with this so called “SAFE” act. Those of us with firearms that are affected by this garbage are already modifying them so they no longer fit the descriptions, therefore we are not going to register. Your rant seemed to jump back and forth from those in political positions and people like me who are fighting for our freedom, sorry if I take offense to the final statement that was along the lines of us being a bloated corpse and living with what we deserve.

    • @Mike, when I say you deserve it, I do not mean you Mike, I mean the majority of the people in your state, because the majority have chosen the course. I really wish you well in turning that boat around, but I don’t believe it will happen before it really crashes. I think it is too far gone.

      As for being a “patriot”, I really seldom use that word Mike, it means many different thing to many different people. Sadly most people now seem to think it means “I vote republican”.

      And why are you modifying your gun, why do you have to? New York, New Jersey, Mass, Illinois and California as states frankly no longer deserve the PRIVILEGE of people like you residing in them in my view Mike.

  14. That is a cute story about the toddler and the c-h-o-c-o-l-a-t-e, but not unusual and not because of any educational software. Kids are very observant, even very young ones. This child has heard these sounds spelled out many times before and observed what has happened. The child does not know how to spell as a general thing.

    With my kids it was i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m, and my friends little kids the same. You cant fool them long, even when they are way too young to read and spell as a general conceptual thing. They will recognize these because we do them enough and they are intensely interested in the sounds, movements and other things we do that procede treats.

  15. Jack, a comment on the guy finding his gas line.

    I forget what you called it when you bend the metal into an “L” then try to find the gas line or water. Let me say I HAVE SEEN IT WORK.

    We did it in a warehouse over just a puddle of water. A person can practice this in their garage. Guy made the things on break and I walked over a little puddle of water, the things “crossed” when I was over the water, then “uncrossed” when I was away from it.

    I encourage people to try this if just to see how it works and as a “mini-skill” for 13 skills. This being said, the place to practice is *NOT* over a gas line. But I would suggest the guy try it, pay the $200, and see how close it came. The guy who taught me said when he drilled for water someone showed him the trick and asked to see how close he came to what the professionals found. He was within a few feet, as they say “close enough for government work.”

  16. Two cents on “dousing…” Our operator would always have a pair of brass rods (aka divining rods) in his machine and everyone on the job knew how to use them. They came in handy when locates were less than… accurate.