Comments

Episode-1497- Listener Feedback for 1-12-15 — 43 Comments

    • not necessarily. I just haven’t heard it before, and I wondered where you got that information.

      • Some is just from techniques I have learned over the years on primitive skills. Such as what does one do with bones when noting akin to a pot exists to boil it in.

        One takes the stomach of a large animal and puts bones and other unused bits inside it. One digs a hole at the same time. Then one puts rocks into a fire and gets them screaming hot. Using sticks you then put the rocks into the stomach along with water and bones and what not. This makes the water boil.

        Of course the stomach is in the hole when you add water, bones, bits and pieces and the hot rocks. Next you put dry leaves on the stomach, a few inches deep, you then bury it and leave it for a full day. When you dig it up it is still steaming hot. When I learned to make it, we called it “stomach soup” and it was DAMN GOOD. It is for all intents bone broth.

        I figure if we can figure this out now, they could figure it out then.

        Bone broth is by the way a staple in most indigenous cultures.

        As an aside, have you ever heard the children’s story, about Stone Soup?

        • point taken. Thanks for the info, I’ve never heard of that before and it’s fascinating!

  1. I’m sure my answer to the prepper scenario will be about a 15-parter.. but to start.. 😉

    Part I
    Teach the circle of influence/circle of concern distinction

    But.. I recently had a small epiphany about a different way to think about this same thing. In ‘Spartan Up’ Joe De Sena mentioned that the priorities for his time (life priorities) are:
    1 – Health
    2 – Family
    3 – Business
    4 – Fun

    If he has any spare time/energy.. it goes to the first thing on the list.. until he’s ‘done that’. Then he moves on to the next thing.

    This is a practical prescription for circle of influence/circle of concern.. what do you start with? The thing you have the MOST control over (your body).. then you move on to less control (your family).. and then even less control (your business)..

    What does this mean practically? Many many days you will NEVER HAVE TIME to even notice anything that isn’t directly effecting YOUR LIFE. All of your time and energy will AUTOMATICALLY be focused on what you can influence.

  2. Jack,

    Regarding ID’ing a weapon by forensic analysis of the bullet, casing, shell, etc. Do you have any specific reasons why you deem this trustworthy?

    I’ve long been skeptical of the idea that one could routinely say with certainty “this round was fired by this weapon”. Possibly because I’ve seen the idea taken too frightening extremes, such as “the pair of pliers found in the suspect’s truck match the tooth marks on the victim’s battery post, PROVING he was at the scene of the murder”. In another case I remember seeing the scratch mark made by a screw driver was supposedly a key piece of evidence…

    Under specific circumstances it can work certianly, if the firearm had some unique characteristic very very unlikely to be repeated in any other weapon, say I had a custom firing pin made that engraved my initials into the primer with every shot (to be ridiculous) then yes that’d be very persuasive. But I just can’t see variations due to manufacturing tolerances and normal wear and tear being adequate to match a bullet, brass, etc, to the weapon that fired it. These variations are going to be very slight and very hard to detect, and there’s no guarantee that 10 rounds fired from the same gun at the same time would show identical patterns. Under more ordinary circumstances though I question whether there’s really much more to see than “the weapon had 5 rifling grooves and a 1-9” rate of twist”… which is like saying “the assailant was 6′ tall and weighed 190 lbs” it could prove the innocence of someone who did not match that profile, but isn’t anywhere near specific enough to prove guilt.

    You mention that the defense in the case that prompted this discussion didn’t challenge that evidence, but if a regular Joe is on trial for murder is it even possible for him to do so? He’s probably bankrupt long before he can look at hiring an expert witnesses to challenge the state’s expert witnesses, and would it even be worth it to try to convince the jury that something they all believe is true (that it’s easy to match a bullet, etc. to the weapon that fired it) is in fact false.

    To boil it down, do you, or anyone else, know of any examples where someone took, say, 30 copies of a common firearm, fired 10 rounds through each, then gave the 300 bullets and casings (each with a unique ID for traceability) and 30 guns to a forensic expert to see how reliably they could match evidence to weapon? Because in absence of this sort of validation I worry that the strength of such evidence is dramatically overstated.

    • Yes I do and explaining it in detail requires way more effort than I care to expend in a blog comment. But if you know anything about machine tooling, the answer is pretty easy to comprehend.

      • I’m not an expert, but I do have a lot of experience that is relevant.

        Having done a bit more research now I think I’m finding my skepticism is not totally misplaced.

        from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_fingerprinting)

        “A California Department of Justice survey, using 742 guns used by the California Highway Patrol as a test bed, showed very poor results; even with such a limited database, less than 70% of cases of the same make as the “fingerprint” case yielded the correct gun in the top 15 matches; when a different make of ammunition was used, the success rate dropped to less than 40%.”

        Now this test was attempting to use a computer database to match a recovered casing with a (rather small) database of firearms, and the original report that the quote is based on (of which I’ve only found portions) does seem to assume that a human analysis is superior in accuracy to the computer systems, but if a state of the art computer system can only correctly state “this case was fired in one of these 15 guns” (with only 742 possible choices) 70% of the time under PERFECT conditions, I tend to doubt the markings, impressions, etc are usually as clear and incontrovertible as prosecutors and TV dramas would have people believe.

        It’s not that I don’t think there aren’t any potentially identifiable marks left on a bullet or case by the gun firing it, but it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio is extremely bad, and I’ve not yet found a controlled, blind, study testing how accurately an analyst can match evidence to firearms, and my days of trusting anyone from the government by default are long past.

        • I’m the one that brought the question to Jack, first, I’d like to thank Jack for taking my question.
          I brought the question to Jack because I know he knows a tremendous amount about guns and ammo, and my knowledge of guns and ammo are very limited.
          When answering my question, Jack raised the problem that if you were on the jury, it can become a “preponderance of evidence” issue.
          In regards to this specific case, my gut tells me the guy was guilty. But I have a personal bias that I want to see evidence proving it before seeing someone go to jail for the rest of their life.
          There was a lot of circumstantial stuff in the case such as the crime scene was way off the beaten path, so an opportunistic robbery is unlikely, and she was ambushed in her bedroom behind the cash register of the motel, the cash from the till was stolen but nothing else, and why would a robber who already stole the cash go into the bedroom just to murder when they didn’t have to. This kind of deductive reasoning can build a case against the husband who had motive in her death, but it’s not evidence that supports a stand alone case.
          Which leads to the shell casing, if somehow it could be determined that the shell casing on the floor in the bedroom is the shell casing used in her murder, and that it was fired from his gun, by him, that of course would be good news for justice in general, and be the “smoking gun” in this case. But when I see an “expert” blow up a photo of 2 shell casings about 20 times normal size and say that he’s 100% certain that it was fired from this gun by this man to kill this woman and no other possibility would be explained because “they look similar enough” my BS meter just goes through the roof. Then I hear that their examining a shotgun shell casing of a cheap shotgun and cheap ammo that you can buy just about anywhere, and my BS meter goes into the stratosphere.
          If the “expert” could point to some mark on the shell casing and say I know it was fired from a Mossberg 12 Gauge because this is unique to this brand of weapon because… then ok, I’d believe that.
          Then if there was something unique to the individual weapon, say a chip no matter how small on the hammer that leaves a specific mark on the primer. Ok, more still, and it can keep on building. But it’d never be 100% certain under any circumstances.
          But, “This is a similar size dent in the primer that looks close enough therefore I’m 100% certain” – I’m sorry, but no. I’m not buying it.
          And I’m less concerned about this guy (who, again I think likely did it), and more concerned about what it says about our justice system, if anyone can be railroaded because they left a shell casing in their bedroom after going to the range. (Which is what his story was)

        • Keep in mind you were watching INFOTAINMENT. Not reality. Those shows always make it seem as if the accused could be innocent or else there’d be no cliff hanger ending! In fact I have discovered a formula for all the 48 hours mystery stuff. If you are pretty sure the guy is guilty by the end of the show, the jury will rule innocent and vise versa.

          No you can’t look at a primers dent for a match alone. But again the bolt face will absolutely leave tooling marks on the shell. Would this be a 100% match as good as a fingerprint. I’d have to hear both sides experts and view comparable on a case by case basis. There is no doubt however if you fired the same make of ammo in the same gun, there would be identifying marks that would make it highly unlikely that if you had a match the round was fired in a different weapon.

          It may not be as conclusive as DNA but it is far more than say circumstantial evidence.

          Again though never believe for a minute that you heard what the jury heard on one of those shows. They are far from documentaries. They are in fact yet another form of non reality TV.

        • @Modern Survival – very true, and point taken.
          I have just found the phrase “like a fingerprint” to become a catch all for “we have evidence, it’s irrefutable, so don’t ask questions”. And my natural instinct is to ask more questions when I hear something like that.
          Using a fingerprint as an example, if you and I were to stand next to each other, and both put our index fingers on a glass table at the same time, we would both leave a fingerprint that has very small but distinctive marks. If I were to rub my finger on the glass, my marks would be more smudged than yours meaning the quality of my fingerprint would not be as high, and the confidence of making a match would be lower. We could repeat this 100 times or 1,000 times, and I’m never going to leave a different fingerprint behind, I’m never going to leave your fingerprint behind.
          As another example, DNA always gets a probability attached to it, “the odds of this being a false identification are 1 in 3.8 Billion” But no matter how good the DNA match is, the scientists will never say they are 100% certain of anything.
          If I bought 2 identical guns, and fired 100 shots of identical ammunition from each. There would have to be exactly 100 shell casings with 1 set of marks, and 100 shell casings with the other set of marks. If even 1 shot were to have different marks for any reason, it’s simply not science. It’s NOT like a fingerprint or DNA. Even if that were true, I still can’t get my head around how an “expert” would say that they are “similar enough”. Wouldn’t they either be identical or not identical? To me, “similar enough” is: it’s the same ammunition fired from a 12 gauge shotgun of some make and model to be determined. To which, if I were a juror, I’d think to myself “Wow, that’s a crack investigative team at work:)”

          I did a basic google search, and the first thing that came up was an article from the American Bar Association referencing a study done in 2008 and 2009 as to the validity of ballistics testing in general as well as the quality of personnel that are typically doing the testing. I attached the link below. It should link you to the correct page, but in case it doesn’t it’s Page 50 that’s relevant.

          http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/criminal_justice_magazine/cjw11scientificevidence.authcheckdam.pdf

  3. Hey Jack, I was wondering if you had read much good commentary on the “student loan bubble” issue. I feel like it’s obviously coming, but I’m curious to hear if there are any economists/policymakers/etc. talking about it and if you had read anything like that.

  4. Part II
    Teach the cognitive biases. Numerous studies show that just being AWARE of these decreases their influence on you:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

    If you’d like to read a book that’s more entertaining than this list, try ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ – Daniel Kahneman

    http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421103221&sr=8-1&keywords=thinking+fast+and+slow

    Frankly, its fascinating stuff..

  5. As far as education goes. The powers that be have been repeating the lie, “their teaching is the key to your success” for a time. They completely remove the emphasis on the students abilities. I’ve told my kids that all the degrees in the world won’t help if you can’t go to work and actually get things done. Basic things.

    South Carolina already pays for a two year degree if you have a high enough grade point average. It’ paid for by our “Education Lottery” or what most people refer as the poor people tax.

  6. On Government:
    Bastiat points out something very interesting.. which is every ‘program’ of government.. removes RESPONSIBILITY from the individual, and transfers it to the ‘group’.

    Now, this might sound like a good idea.. but, there are some problems.

    Groups have no animus. Individuals take action, groups do not.

    Secondly, by removing responsibility & the pain of failure to meet said responsibility.. government removes the most powerful instructive force of nature, designed to help you succeed by showing you what works, and what doesn’t. Pain.

    No pain = no need to change. No pain = no lesson learned about what works and what doesn’t.

    What’s the message of government? YOU’RE NOT RESPONSE-ABLE.

    Your retirement.. forget about it! Your health, your children, your education, your employment, your safety.. just sit back and relax, while we take care of all those pesky problems.

    And hey.. what to think, what to pay attention to, what’s important.. we can handle that for you to! No need to wear yourself out with all that hard thinkin’.

  7. I think you need to add an aspirin supplier to the MSB. After all your rants today my head is hurting 🙁

  8. The podcast froze at 1:08 run time. Wondering if its just me or others having the same situation?

    On a separate note, bone broth sounds wonderful, especially on a cold day. Looking forward to making some.

  9. Lead them, always lead them. Ask the questions which cause them to ask the right questions. Then show your praise in their asking the right questions that prove they’re thinking critically.

  10. I evaluated a project on vertical farms last summer that was intriguing but ultimately killed because the numbers didn’t work.

    Vertical farms have a definite niche but they are not something you would find on 99.9% of permaculture sites due to their capital, energy, and offtake requirements.

    They have four major constraints:

    1) They are energy intensive and need megawatts of power. Assume ~1 MW of solar per acre of space. You will need 4-5 acres of utility scale solar for every acre of vertical farm.

    2) There is a minimum scale – you need 120,000 square feet as a minimum size to meet the volume requirements necessary to get a multi-year offtake agreement for what you produce. Think in terms of a truck load or 20′ ISO refrigerated container load per day of production.

    3) You have to have an offtake agreement pre-selling your production that covers the life of the financing. You need massive year-round volume and you have to profitably produce it while getting $0.50 to $1.00 per pound.

    4) You need access to the capital markets. These projects are capital intensive – $10 to $20 million is the ballpark range of capital needed with at least half of it being invested in energy production and energy efficiency. These projects also are job creators and often involve economic development planning, permits, and incentives. This is a mid-market investment banking project, not a Joel Salatin type of an ag model.

    These can be incredibly flexible and can easily produce a variety of products so they are not monocultures. They also offer controlled environments that are clean and more efficient for certain crops. There is a place for them. Most will be in urban areas close to large markets as half of the savings result from cutting food miles.

  11. There’s a place near where i grew up in Flushing, Queens NY that makes a great bone marrow
    soup.

  12. Can the federal government force the states to sign up for a program the feds don’t completely fund? I’d imagine that ‘state pays 25%’ clause would make it an optional program the state could buy into or reject, but this isn’t exactly my area of expertise.

  13. Jack, I did a little back of the calculator figuring on the hydroponic lettuce growing in Japan. First, I think that the energy savings is compared to Fluorescent lighting. Secondly, I think that it requires about 17 watts of grow light per plant. I think that LEDs are about 1/3 efficient, so you get 10 watts of heat for 7 watts of light. That 17 watts X 14 hours, X 30 days is about 7 Kilowatts of electric. My Electric run $0.14/KW. This is almostt a dollar per plant… Hardly any energy saved if my assumption of 17 watts per .66 SF is right. Pretty expensive, if you ask me. This only makes sense if the cost of space is way higher than the cost of energy.

    • Alright.. lets expand on that. You smack a high rise food production building right in the middle or a large city. Everything grown/produced is sold on the ground floor. Your ‘stock’ is in the ground/tank right up until you restock/sell it.

      So, no transportation cost, spoilage/damage during transport is zero, nothing spoils in your ‘warehouse’, and the freshness is through the roof compared to ‘other continent’ vegetables.. so you can charge a premium (you can also charge a ‘novelty’ or entertainment premium).

      You can of course tie this in to collecting local food waste and composting it onsite, or feeding it to tilapia or other ‘garbage fish’.

  14. Jack,
    15:oo’ish, reminds me of Aces and Eights…I employ this seating arrangement as well.

    • I do every time. I don’t have the patience for the slow boiling/simmering. No less than 30 min @ 15 lbs and no more than an hour. Comes out great every time.

  15. This is the first prepper scenario I have answered and also the toughest one I think. I’m still struggling with critical thinking myself. I like to think I’ve always been a somewhat critical thinker, but these days I wonder if I’ve become too gullible in some areas. Anyways, I think the best things to teach young people in order to filter information is to always have an open mind (if you can’t refute it with facts, don’t disregard it based on beliefs), but also verify information that you have questions on. If something can’t be verified, don’t take a stance either way. Leave your mind open to all options in that case.

    I’m excited to see what other people post in response to this scenario as well as what Jack thinks. I’m pregnant right now and I wonder how I’m going to raise my kid to be an independent thinker….at least baby is listening to the podcast every weekday so it’s got a headstart on most kids 🙂

  16. In response to this week’s scenario:

    Two things that have helped me tune out the garbage as a young person (these may look familiar to you, Jack): Turn off the TV and turn off the computer/smartphone. It is so easy to become addicted to these things without realizing it, and that is the greatest distraction of all. Now, I have a TV and a computer and I use them both. I do not watch any news and when I do watch TV it’s through some sort of advertisement-free service, like Netflix. I use Facebook, my email, TSP, and a couple other websites regularly, and that’s it. It has taken discipline and I’m not there yet, undoing 25 years of technology addiction doesn’t happen overnight after all.

    I have found myself recently lamenting the fact that I missed out on so much as a kid and teenager because of all the distractions in my life, and not just technological ones. If I had admitted what I really liked to do earlier, I could have pursued it more and gained some experience instead of having to start now as an adult. Parents, if your kids are really interested in something that’s maybe not the most prestigious or lucrative field of work in your eyes, do them a favor and bite your tongue. Instead of clucking in disapproval and distracting them from their goals, try to engage them and learn their motivations and thought process. Have conversations that teach them to think critically about themselves and the world. Once you’re an adult, there is very little opportunity for failure without consequence. Allow your kids to fail safely and they will learn to succeed greatly.

  17. Prepped Scenario: Teaching kids to think better

    I have never answered a prepped scenario before, but this one strikes homes to me, and I personally think my parents did a good job with this one, even if we no loner agree with each others world views. So I got a couple thing I will be doing to raise my future kids as discerning minds.

    1) Never lie to your kids.
    To me this one is huge. Never lie to your kids period. Why you ask? Well let’s use an example. You tell your kids to believe in Jesus, Santa Claus, Small government, gun ownership and personal liberty. Kids are very impressionable and believe you 100%. Then you tell em Santa isn’t real. One of two things happens. They go, “if Santa isn’t real, what else have that taught me isn’t real? Maybe government is good”. Then you just unraveled all your teaching. Or they determine that its OK for trusted authorities to lie to them. Also bad.

    2) engage them like adults when they want to be
    From a very young age I was fascinated by politics and the economy. My mom was a politically aware economics professor. I distinctly remember listening to rush Limbaugh before Clinton was elected, which means I was 8 or less. I had lots of questions and opinions, and I would ask and we would talk about it. I can only imagine the misformed ideas and opinions of an 8 year old, but I was never dismissed. Always just guided and made smarter.

    3). Limit screen time
    As a kid I was limited to a half hour of TV a day, and they didn’t have smart phones or the internet then. I was allowed to use the computer, but even that was more learning based. My alternative was reading. I read the lord of the rings for the first time when I was 10, and devoured many other things.

    4) either home school or supplement their learning
    My wife and I were both miserable in school, and I am amazed we didn’t break and lose our spark. My kids will be home schooled, because my wife doesn’t work. If you can’t pull that off, at least look at what they are learning and teach them the truth. If you enjoyed school, and got straight a’s, you are not a discerning mind.

    5) Be proud when your kids reach a strong conclusion, even if its different than yours.

    This is where my parents failed. If your kids have good reason for believing what they do, and can use the trivium to explain it, then be proud. Kids shouldn’t be clones of you, they should surpass you. If you try to bend them to your will, you will neither break their spark, or you will kill the relationship.

    That’s my entry jack, as you can see, this was a passion point for me. I enjoyed it.

    Andy in Atlanta

  18. Prepped Scenario: Teaching kids to think better

    I have never answered a prepped scenario before, but this one strikes homes to me, and I personally think my parents did a good job with this one, even if we no loner agree with each others world views. So I got a couple thing I will be doing to raise my future kids as discerning minds.

    1) Never lie to your kids.
    To me this one is huge. Never lie to your kids period. Why you ask? Well let’s use an example. You tell your kids to believe in Jesus, Santa Claus, Small government, gun ownership and personal liberty. Kids are very impressionable and believe you 100%. Then you tell em Santa isn’t real. One of two things happens. They go, “if Santa isn’t real, what else have that taught me isn’t real? Maybe government is good”. Then you just unraveled all your teaching. Or they determine that its OK for trusted authorities to lie to them. Also bad.

    2) engage them like adults when they want to be
    From a very young age I was fascinated by politics and the economy. My mom was a politically aware economics professor. I distinctly remember listening to rush Limbaugh before Clinton was elected, which means I was 8 or less. I had lots of questions and opinions, and I would ask and we would talk about it. I can only imagine the misformed ideas and opinions of an 8 year old, but I was never dismissed. Always just guided and made smarter.

    3). Limit screen time
    As a kid I was limited to a half hour of TV a day, and they didn’t have smart phones or the internet then. I was allowed to use the computer, but even that was more learning based.

  19. Sorry for the double post jack. You can delete this and the half a one if you like. Phone was being stupid.

  20. “Stop opening you mouth like a baby bird and letting the media puke down your throat!” Brilliant.

  21. Jack,
    I mentioned the cost of community college vs the cost of public school, and I was met with some plausible costs not associated with community college. I personally don’t think these things would equate the difference, but I am coming up short finding out good, unbiased info. The areas this person pointed out is in special education, busing, and behavioral education (glad I graduated in 1988, not today). The girl is a friend, and works in the probabtion part of law enforcement. She is claiming $100/day for special needs programs, which I asked here for a percentage of kids that are that severe. She didn’t have a percentage, and wouldn’t guess. I asked why these small minority of children couldn’t be educated at home with computers, instead of the busing, special teachers, etc. I guessed teacher’s unions, and she didn’t disagree. I didn’t realize how messed up and behind we are in the US until I was breaking down all the extra mandates pushed onto schools. I brought up home schooling, and her knee-jerk reaction was social skills. When I asked her how many youths she saw, and how depraved some of them were, she admitted maybe she wouldn’t want her kids being around the element all day at school. The dismal tide, indeed.

    • My sister’s a special-ed teacher for moderate to severe disability children. I can assure you, that the cost for the moderate to severe children is much higher than $100 per day. There is a special fund that acts like an insurance policy for schools when they get these kids, they put money in every year, and then draw from it when the government mandates that they “accommodate” the child by providing all sorts of medical equipment etc. so the child can attend school without there being a major medical event by having them out of medical care. In some of these cases, the medical equipment alone will be more than $200k. And there’s not a person involved in the school district, my sister included, who ever thinks that maybe this isn’t a good idea. Perhaps if it requires $200k+ in medical equipment just to transport the kid safely from their house or hospital to the school, attend school, and then back. Maybe, they have more important issues going on in their life than learning how to draw.
      And don’t even get me started on what the ROI is on this child’s education. Simply put, there isn’t one! This is just a waste of taxpayer money. Off my soapbox and back to work I go

  22. Did I miss the comments about making bone broth with a slow cooker? At the start of the segment I heard Jack mention he would give his thoughts on that, but I realized that I don’t remember hearing those thoughts. Did I miss it or was it not covered after all?

  23. Regarding the Texas doctor,
    A couple years ago a dr. in Washington state did the same thing. Worked out great, everyone that voluntarily participated liked it. No one complained. Then the state found out, sued him for “selling insurance” and shut him down.
    I hope Texas leaves him alone, but I doubt they will.