↓
 

Episode-1549- Listener Calls for 4-3-15

The Survival Podcast Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (27.6MB)

Join Me Today as I Answer Your eMails

Today on The Survival Podcast I take your calls to 866-65-THINK

Today on The Survival Podcast I take your calls on water, business, legal battles, ponds, international travel, the military, teaching, “master gardeners” and more.

Remember to be on a show like this one just pick up your phone and call 866-65-THINK. The best way to improve your chances of being on the air is ask your question or make your point up front, then provide details.

Also please do your best to call from a quiet area with a good connection and speak up so you can be well heard.

While I can’t put all calls on the air but I do my best to get as many of them on as I can.

Join Me Today As I Respond to Your Calls and Discuss…

  • Is nitrogen in your well water a concern, how does it get there, what can you do about it
  • Start a business now or take a very high paying job to raise funds
  • When to work for liberty, vs. walk to it (Bakers Green Acres Saga Continues)
  • Ben Falk with more on pond aeration
  • Steven Harris on International Travel Prep (blow you away level of detail)
  • A yelp for teachers?  It turns out they do exist!
  • Why I don’t give a fiddlers fart about “Jade Helm”
  • When not to bother with swales
  • How do you decide what your price point is in business
  • Thoughts on “Master Gardener” courses

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 (866-658-4465) and you might hear yourself on the air.

Also remember we have an expert council you can address your calls to. If you do this you should email me right after your call at jack at thesurvivalpodcast.com with expert council call in the subject line. In the body of your email tell me that you just called in a question for the council and what number you called in from. I will then give the call priority when I screen calls.

Join the MSB Today

Join the MSB Today

Want Every Episode of TSP Ever Produced?

Remember in addition to discounts to over 40 vendors who supply stuff you are likely buying anyway, tons of free ebooks and video content, MSB Members also get every edition of The Survival Podcast ever produced in convenient zip files in blocks of 24. More info on the MSB can be found here.

Comments

Episode-1549- Listener Calls for 4-3-15 — 18 Comments

  1. Alex Jones needs to be called walking eagle.
    Because he is so full of crap that he cant evan fly. 🙂

  2. Hey Jack,
    Dave from NC here thanks for going into such detail on the question about pricing goods and services. When I asked it I never expected that level of detail.

    Dave

    • I second this. The discussion on pricing was one of my all time favorite answers. The parallels between sales and psychology and maybe game theory is riveting.

  3. Jack, you are often mentioning men following this path and having to convince their wives…..My hubby is our bring home the bacon person, am the homestead off grid wanting person. Most my lady friends are dragging their spouses along this path. You often mention letting the wife get a top of the list priority to ease their reluctance. What about ideas on getting our men on board. Not just supporting us emotionally, and financially, but actually being happy and thrilled to live the life away from the herd.

    Thanks

  4. Just a quick addition/correction for today’s episode.

    As a rural resident of Wisconsin, I personally have to deal with contaminated well water due to current agricultural practices. While I’m a big fan and owner of a berkey system, they won’t remove one of the three main issues we face: nitrates. They will remove E. coli and nitrites, but the only ways to remove nitrates are distillation, dionization, or reverse osmosis (RO). We use an RO system to remove/lower the nitrates from our drinking water (not whole house).

  5. (RE: Time vs. Money)
    Jack,

    Thanks for taking my call. As I mentioned near the end of it, we had already made our decision (via a long discussion just like you mentioned), but I guess what continued to elude us and what I was trying to get at in the call (I’m not always good at conveying my thoughts verbally) is how to best quantify and logically determine where exactly that time/money dividing line actually is and know when you’ve reached it? For example, before getting the offer we felt good with our to-date accumulated savings for our endeavor (enough to get running and over 2 years’ living expenses), yet after the interview and the offer we weren’t so sure and found ourselves reappraising things and thinking of the increased options and/or the “everything’s gone to shit” insurance that 80K+ would bring. Nothing changed externally between then and now, yet our opinion and assessment of what is ‘good enough’ did subtly change. So while we discussed all the specific pros and cons, we had a hard time in quantifying or analytically comparing the time/money tradeoff and just ultimately had to go with our gut feeling and came to our decision intuitively (BTW we did accept the offer). Listening to your comments (i.e. pray on it, take time for quiet contemplation), it sounds like these time vs. money decisions often boil down to intuition and instinct anyway, and perhaps analytical comparison, while not useless, is still fundamentally limited here?

    Anyway I’ll take everything you said to heart as far as how we approach this year of saving. Thankfully savings discipline is not a problem for me or my wife (one of the many reasons I married her!) and having already purged a great deal of our extraneous stuff we have no intention of buying more crap we’d need to lug around in the future. Yet I still do like the idea of a separate account to sequester the money… it has no downside and as disciplined as we are, it can’t hurt to do it anyway just to help keep us honest 😉

  6. On Michigan….

    The entire state is basically a pile of sand pushed up by glaciers. The father north you go, the more true that is. Water tables are high. Our well was 30 ft deep, but that was just to get deep enough that the ground could filter the water. There were areas of our property where if dug a 3 ft hole, it would start filling with water.

    It is really sad to hear about Baker’s Green Acres farm. I washed my hands of that state in 2001, and moved to SC. That is why I had such high hopes for Walkingtofreedom.com. The area he set up his farm in is the same area I left (The town he is close to is the football rival of the school I graduated from). If I were to start something like his farm here, the paper would be out and doing a story about it, and the chamber of commerce would be pushing me to become certified sc grown, https://certifiedscgrownqa.sc.gov/ , then pressuring larger businesses to do business with me instead of importing from out of state.

    I got a facebook message from an old friend today. “hey im moving in a year or less, hows the job market around there? its either tn or sc. I’m done with stupid michigan.”

    Yip, come on down.

  7. Steve Harris was right on in his advice. You’ll need an adapter for Ireland. Get several. Take a converter only if you need one for your devices.
    Buy a hairdryer and curling iron there as Steve recommended.
    Some additional information on traveling in Ireland.
    Ireland is more wired than the US, so getting assistance on electronics is pretty easy in most decent sized towns. Some rental cars will have USB.
    I’ve been there 5 times and put together a website with travel tips and a travel journal for most of the trips. Feel free to contact me directly for any questions.
    http://www.karott.com/ireland/

    • One add-on to this comment and what Steven said:

      You can tell if your appliance needs a converter or adapter quite easily. Virtually any product that plugs into a wall will have label somewhere listing it’s voltage range and amperage or power draw. This label is required by all listing agencies that I know of and is always permanently placed somewhere easily seen on the product or power supply. If it says something to the effect of “input: 120 VAC” then you’d better not plug it into a 220V circuit and you’d need a big heavy converter, not just the travel-friendly adapter. If it says “Input: 100-250 VAC” then you can safely plug it into virtually any outlet in the world and all you need is the adapter to make the pins physically connect.

      As a general rule, “power bricks” like you see with laptops, LCD screens, printers, etc. are usually ~110-240 V and work world wide. Most good, modern, cell phone chargers are also good to go. Old fashioned “wall warts” are generally NOT rated for voltages and will cook itself or your device if plugged into 220 when rated for 110.

      Virtually anything that operates off AC (i.e. doesn’t have a wall-wart, power brick, power supply, etc) will only work at one voltage or the other, this means your hair dryer, coffee maker, curling iron, etc are almost certainly not going to react well to being plugged into 240V if rated for 120V (seriously, don’t do it). You can get a converter, but they’re expensive and heavy and probably can’t power any of the devices I mention above anyways, like Steven said, just buy a cheap hairdryer when you get there if you can’t do without.

      Just remember these are general rules not absolute, the only way to be sure is to look at the label that will be on your product somewhere, Don’t plug your device from the US into an international outlet without finding that label and confirming that it can work with the local voltage.

  8. I put out a call to fellow Wisconsinites: Let’s stand together to make Wisconsin that line that Jack was talking about in this episode. While our Govenor, Scott Walker, is solidly crap-tacular, akin to Texas’ Rick Perry, there have been a few solidly positive developments under his administration. Concealed carry, school finance reform, tax cuts and in general an admission that not all is sunshine and magical unicorn farts.

    We’ve got Michigan to the east but their statist stench is blocked by Lake Michigan, we have Illinois to the south. What can I say about Illinois that hasn’t already been beat to death in these circles? It’s a progressive, collectivist, statist hell hole. No hope there. We have Minnesota to the west and save for Minneapolis/St. Paul it’s a decidedly self-sufficient, Libertarian state. Minnesota is also the gateway to the western plains and mountain states where freedom is very much alive.

    I call out to all Wisconsinites let’s make Wisconsin that point where this statist bullshit that is running out of the gutters of the eastern US stops. No further! Wisconsin is a beautiful state and full of people who prefer to be left alone. We get a bad name because of Madison and Milwaukee but the rest of the state is quite Libertarian in practice, though many would identify Democrat by default.

    Wisconsin is a key state separating the statist East from the Free West. I would love to form a “quick reaction force” here in Wisconsin that is available to bring a lot of human capitol to bear on various issues that pop up here in state. When the state or State is trying to force it will on us we would be a group that would show up and stand in someone’s front yard and call bullshit on the governmental bullies pushing us around.

    Who is in? I know if we could form some type of nucleus group Jack would back us with moral support in the least. Just to be clear, any militia types who are looking for a violent conflict with Big Gov, please look elsewhere. That’s not modern survivalism. That’s stupid.

    As I listened to this show driving to work today I was thinking to myself, “When is Jack just going to make the call to action? When will enough actually be enough? When is it time?” Then I realized that’s exactly what Jack had done. It’s up to us to take the action using the principles that form the basis of modern survivalism. Now is the time. Wisconsin is the place; at least one of the places. The time for action is here. Who will answer the call?

    • Let’s also keep in mind that there are people who live in these other states (I’m in Michigan) who are of a similar mind. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

      • I hear you brother!! I don’t mean any disrespect to those who are fighting for freedom in places like Michigan and Illinois. But those two states are probably too far gone to bring back. I know IL is for sure, MI is close to the point of no return if it hasn’t crossed already.

        Wisconsin is a solid place to make a stand. A state with many farmers, a population that is fed up with the current political paradigm and not terribly trusting of Big Gov. To me it makes sense to stand here. We’ve had some high profile cases in this state where the small farmer actually won; Vernon Herschberger and his raw milk farm in one that comes to mind. He didn’t win 100% of what he wanted but he did damn well! Just think what would’ve been possible if our little QRF had 500 voices behind it begging the statists to try and screw with us??

        • I’m in! Stephen I think we should at least include the UP. Call it more-northern WI, or it could even be its own state. The great state of Yooper!
          We should get out to range sometime, Rogue, or at the very least, work on our “command voices”.
          BTW, you seem about 9 shades of fired up the past month or so. I like it!

        • The UP always been a bit… Different. Michigan is basically 3 states, the UP, northern lp, and the flatlanders. Problem is that flatlanders overlord the rest of the population due to the massive 2/3 of the population in the flatlands. For decades, the government of Michigan has been doing the magicians act. Diverting everyone’s attention to a proliberty occurrence, such as lifting the short barreled rifle ban, while nobody noticed that at the same time the courts gutted the right to farm act so that now the case law says it doesn’t apply to small operations, like baker’s green acres or the mom who had an organic homestead because a child was allergic to the additives in mass produced food, but only to huge commercial operations. And the “pro liberty thing everyone clamours about is something that isn’t illegal in 90% of the country.

          I make roughly $35,000 a year at my primary employment in south Carolina. I was offered a job making just over $120,000, doing the same job, in the county I basically grew up in, and where half my family lives, and a free house on 7 acres in the country, and I turned it down. This is also why many residents are down right militant.

          Michigan is a patient that has coded, the nurses have emptied 3 crash carts trying to revive them, and they’ve been doing chest compressions for an hour, yet the Dr refuses to call it.

          Maybe if the UP seceded from MI. I would consider that, if the wolves got thinned out so that the deer could repopulate. I have family in ironwood and have heard how the wolves have the area under seige.

        • Trolls….I was a yooper for the better part of my 1st 20 years. We called it militiagun for a reason.

  9. Jack, a word about the Master Gardener course.

    My wife and I are taking it right now through the Michigan State University extension, and a lot of what you said is pretty accurate. The MSU MG program revised their curriculum recently to include a lot more info on organic methods (we talk plenty about diatomacious earth, the evils of phosphorus runoff, heirloom plants, etc.), though there’s still a thread of “conventional” wisdom in it. In general, I think it depends on the teacher. I have two good ones; my wife’s teachers are a little so-so. We DO talk more than I’d like about fertilizer and sprays and lawns, but that’s also knowledge that is worth having, even if you don’t use them, and I woudn’t have spent the time on my own to get the knowledge that they’ve shared.

    The class is also a mile wide and an inch deep. We cover a lot of ground in not a lot of time (14 classes, 4 hrs each), which has been my biggest disappointment with it.

    However, like you suggested, there’s a really BIG emphasis on volunteering (there’s a yearly hour requirement), teaching, and community involvement. So, what it takes is a handful of people who are focused more on peppers than on petunias who can draw attention to food issues through the MG volunteer opportunities and the “Master Gardener” title. I intend to spend my volunteer hours working in the community garden in my town that is connected with a community food pantry.

    Also, it tends to be cheaper than what I’ve seen most PDCs cost. Also, my parents actually gifted us the cost of the class without us asking and I don’t think they would have for a PDC because they just don’t know what it is and tend to be skeptical of “new” things. Also, as one of the only 30 year old male’s in the class (full of mostly middle-aged women), I’ve gotten a little more attention from the organizers because I think they’re excited to have some younger people involved.

    So, all in all, it’s a thing that has it’s downsides and it’s benefits. Like you said, it’s a pretty quick entry way into the local gardening community and also a way to get familiar with extension agents (who, in my experience, are extremely knowledgeable people who may have a different point of view than me, but are a tremendous resource). I’ve been pleased that I took the course.

  10. A couple years back I attended an all day event by both local ag extensions. Most people who attended were getting hours for their master gardeners certification. I didn’t know that, simply went to see what was going on with our local growing stuff community.
    Best part of program, many brought local flowering bulbs to share, the young guy with a phd in bugs, esp bees who sat sat next to me, giving me input on how other speakers info helped or hurt bees. He told me which bulbs to make sure I got starts from and the bees liked those. Much about bees and fruit trees, shrubs, etc. He was also one of the speakers. I also like those who talked about bluebirds and other local wildlife. Another guy talked about grants their state’s extension office was giving for growing organic type food in hoop houses type things and how to get these.
    Worst part was talk on growing grass for golf courses, how to have that kind of turf in your landscaping. Bee guy spoke after the turf guy and yep their approaches to growing stuff was completely different.

↑