Link to the spirko week stuff:
http://permies.com/t/52318

Link to residual income stream forum:
http://permies.com/forums/f-196/ri

Link to page about PIE:
http://permies.com/t/52136

I’m confused on what’s going to improve the next recovery when the basic fundamentals aren’t getting better. Wages are stagnant for a very large portion of our population and much of our expenditures are not even tied to commodity prices. Costs for taxes like property taxes and local taxes have gone up much more than most people couldn’t have imagined 15 to 20 years ago. Health insurance is anywhere from $400-600 for most family plans and coverage is poor on many plans. Those with student loans still have to pay em, don’t see how commodity prices will help that. I’ve priced cars and trucks, wow, $45000 for a half ton truck is not uncommon. I don’t see food prices down that much either. Those families in the bottom 40% of incomes have very hard time if they want to really get ahead, they’re like treading water all the time.

A huge problem is gonna areas where taxes are exorbitant and people are leaving decreasing the tax base. Don’t see too much cutting government staffing in those states making the burden ever worse. It’s a death spiral that’s gonna leave tons of bond holders holding the bag and tax payers being asked to bail out inefficient corrupt monopolies. It will be interesting to see how all this is going to plan out in the next 2-5 years, not 20 years from now.

In the 1990’s a great deal of my early preparedness was focused around baking. I was going to bake bread as my staple, and biscuits. I got and USED that very same Coleman ‘oven’ that Jack just suggested. I’ve used it alot. It works pretty good. I was using it on top of an 8000 BTU kerosene burner. This was my emergency heater and my cook top surface, and I had around 100 gallons of kerosene in SEALED 5 gallon metal cans (not gas cans) in the garage. Its still there, all sealed up, still good, 20 years later. Kerosene was my stored fuel of choice at the time, it was widely available and I got it for about $1.35/gallon at the gas station, remember, this was the 1990’s.

At that time I was concerned with having a year of food and supplies, now I’m only concerned with a solid month or so.

my setup looks like this
http://amzn.to/1Pprrdb

My main fuel is now natural gas, that runs a generator, that runs an electric bread maker, actually, at least 2 or 3 at a time, to make 2lbs of bread in 58 minutes per bread maker. All of this is in my video “Bread from Gasoline”. where i make 16-2lb loaves of bread from 1 gallon of gasoline in a generator, now that’s a bargain. $2 in fuel, 32 pounds of fresh bread.

If you want to make bread this way, the Bread from Gasoline Video comes for free with the Battery Bank Video at http://www.Battery1234.com

Jack is spot on, what he outlined will give you great functionality and redundancy.

Steve