Link – Desperate Drivers Pay The Price

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Desperate Drivers Pay The Price At NMB Gas Station

MIAMI (CBS4) — Some South Florida drivers double checked their gas bills as they pulled away from the pumps ahead of Tropical Storm Isaac and wondered why it cost so much to fill up.

It’s no surprise now to learn the State of Florida could be very busy with alleged price-gouging cases around South Florida.

Some people, it seems, never learn. If you live an area that is prone to evacuations, wouldnt it make sense to stash enough gasoline on hand to get outta town without having to stop for fuel? Heck, you could even stage fuel at points along your proposed evacuation routes. But, some folks don’t ever seem to learn.

I’m not sure how I feel about price gouging. I’m against .gov telling anyone what price they can or cannot sell a product at. If .gov could jump on a station owner for raising prices on the argument that the public has no choice about the purchasing, then couldn’t ‘gov also force the station owner to keep the station open if he decided to just close shop entirely for the emergency?

This sort of thing is why we keep stored (and stabilized) fuel on hand. To my way of thinking, MPG x gallons stored / 2 = effective range. So, if we have 60 gallons on hand, and the truck gets 15 mpg, thats 900 miles, right? Wrong. I figure a 50% penalty ‘just in case’ for things like detours, backtracking, stop-n-go, idling in traffic, etc, etc. So, to my way of thinking, that’s really a 450-mile range.

Truly, I am amazed that people who would live in a region where an evacuation due to hurricane is likely would not have supplies and fuel in place for this sort of thing.

Link – Rural property with underground lake

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

A year-round 58-degree temperature would be a nice way to beat that Tennessee heat. I’m sure some sort of heat exchange system could be built to regulate the temperature of a house built nearby. But, man, think of the awesome fish farming opportunity…several acres of what is essentially an indoor lake. Obviously a man-made cave…but still….

This is an unbelievable tract. I have never listed a tract this neat with so many possibilities. It has a large creek on the front of the property that runs year round. Just past the creek there is a huge lake that runs almost the length of the property. It is beautiful and great for Bass and Catfish. Next to that, there is a very small pond that has tons of Tadpoles that turn into big frogs, but the neatest thing about this property is the CAVE. It is HUGE.

When you step out of your car ,at the road ,on a 95 degree day, you can feel the 58 degree air hit you. As you walk into the front hole the ceiling is about 25 to 35 feet high(as it is throughout the whole cave) and goes back to the back ,I’m told, an 1/8th of a mile. It has some land inside the cave but is mostly a indoor Lake. It goes from 30 feet deep in some places to up to 2 feet. I have ridden in a canoe back to the back and it is pitch black. I am guessing that there is 5 acres underground in this cave. At this time there are Bass and Bluegill in the Cave, but I have ordered 500 Rainbow Trout.

Can you imagine the revenue brought in by making this a pay lake. The temperature is the same ,YEAR-ROUND, no matter what it is doing outside ,it is a constant 58-60 degrees. What about renting boats and fishing. Renting out to Cub scouts ,church and school events. The possibilities of making money are endless. You could camp inside the cave during a Rainstorm, blistering heat, or even a Tornado and not be affected. I have seen no bats, the cave is very clean and the water is crystal clear other than right in the front where the sun shines in and makes some algae. Don’t miss out on this tract.

 

Why economic issues translate into personal safety ones

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Fella comes to the door yesterday, clipboard in hand, to take a survey for a political candidate. Among the questions was “What is the most important issue to you this election?” and he rattled off things like the economy, debt, jobs, immigration, etc, etc.

Among that list was jobs, federal spending, the deficit and the economy. To me, they all pretty much roll together into one big category of “the economy”.

I was talking to the wife later about the questions and she asked me why I said the economy. To me, that encompassed the most amount of things that directly and indirectly affected our lives. Bad economy? Higher prices. Bad economy? Higher unemployment. Bad economy? Business failures. Bad economy? Higher taxes.  Bad economy? More desperate people.

Once in a while, I get asked why I would prepare with fuel, food, ammo and that sort of thing against what I forsee as an economic disaster. After all, if it’s an economic disaster then all you need to guard against it is an economic defense…such as a big ol’ box of cash and gold, right?

Nope. Here’s todays example..a fella laid off from his job comes back with a gun and shoots former coworkers. And although the story is still very fresh, and the details will probably change, what remains true is that in a bad economy more people are getting laid off, putting them under more stress as they try to keep their homes and their families together and some of those folks are just gonna snap under that stress and take some folks with them. And that doesn’t even include the folks who don’t snap but simply start knocking over 7-11′s, daylight burglaries and doing stickups at ATM’s to keep their houses they couldn’t afford.

So, indirectly, thats how a bad economy affects your safety. It creates a larger group of desperate and unstable people who at some point are just going to go off the rails and commit acts of violence. And this is why in a bad economy it isn’t far-fetched to believe that your preparations and plans against that bad economy should take into account some serious personal safety plans…like things that have triggers and magazines.

Silver > $30

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Well, that was fun while it lasted.

I can’t tell the future but, hey, it’s an election year with a lot at stake. Might be some folks are stocking up against the possibility of continued economic fail.

Of course, it could also drop back below $30 as people see ‘$30′ as their ‘sell trigger’ and unload a buncha the stuff. Who knows?

In the meantime:

Goal0 lights

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

For my birthday, a lovely gal I know got me one of these (Goal Zero 24001 Light-A-Life LED Lamp) off my Amazon Wish List. I had been curious to try one of these out since it looked like it had a lot of the things I was looking for in emergency lighting – runs on 12 v., doesn’t use much electricity, uses long-life LEDs, and lent itself to be operated off several different forms of power supply. So, with one in hand, I started playing with it.

The light comes with a connector to plug it into the proprietary batteries the company sells. However, they also send along an adapter to allow you to run it from anything that has the usual ‘cigarette plug’-style outlet. I happened to have an old ConSci portable power pack laying around and hooked it up to that. (And, to go off on a tangent, that ConSci PPP is pre-Y2K and still seems to run just fine for a little battery-in-a-box portable power supply. Very rugged, very durable…so, of course, it appears to be no longer available. No big deal, easy enough to make your own similar device.) The light gives of the usual sterile cold white LED light but it gives enough to light up the bunker enough to get around. A nice touch is that each light has nine feet of cord and a socket to daisy chain more lights. Well, that certainly sounds interesting..let’s explore that.

Turns out that this week the local CostCo is having Goal0 as one of their visiting ‘roadshow’ products…you know, they clear off a section of floor, the sales rep sets up a little kiosk or something and starts shilling his product. So I went up to CostCo and price checked. On sale at CostCo for $26.99…that was about ten bucks off what Amazon had them at. Ok, I picked up three more and brought them home, giving me a total of four. I daisy-chained ‘em all together and strung them across the length of the house. Killed the lights, flipped a switch on the ConSci PPP and -behold- light. Not just light, mind you, but good light. See, you stand in a dark room and stick a flashlight or other small portable light int he corner and the room looks…stark…and downright brutal, like some sort of interrogation chamber. But, two, three or four lights spread around the room actually lights it up so it looks rather homey. I was quite pleased with how these lights worked. I need to get a few more and then need to start doing some battery math. Ideally I’d want a battery that could run five lights for eight hours a day, for several days, without needing to charge the battery. Hmm..actually, let’s see how this would go… each light is 3 watt at 12 v. so it’s .25 amp. Five lights = 5 x .25amp= 1.25 ah. Run those five lights for eight hours a day comes out to 10 ah/day (8 x 1.25). Run those lights for five days would be 50ah. If I didn’t want to discharge my battery below 50% I’d need a 100 amp battery. Or a 200 amp battery if I didn’t want to discharge below 75%. That sound right?

After playing with these lights for the last couple of days I gotta say I’m pretty pleased. The ability to daisy-chain them together is a huge, huge plus. For setting up a small, self-contained, ‘renewable’ emergency lighting system these things look like the way to go. I need to scale up the battery to some sort of low-maintenance, non-venting type, set it up somewhere out of the way, get a decent solar panel to keep it topped off, and I think that’ll do it. As I said, I just need to sit down and figure out a buncha battery math.

Link – Hazlitt’s ‘Economics in one lesson’

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Hazlitt’s ‘Economics in one lesson’ is, I think, an excellent book. It’s very dated material, since it was written shortly after WW2 when the economy was very different than it is now, but it’s one main message remains: “…the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

Long-term thinking….yeah, I’m a fan.

Anyway, here’s an online copy for you to read at your leisure. You may not agree with it, you may think it is simplistic, dated, or biased in some areas, but it does get you to think.

How does this relate to preparedness? Well, first of all, looking at the long term effects of things is definitely in the realm of preparedness. Secondly, understanding why some things in the economy happen the way they do is also a big advantage…forewarned is forearmed, and all that.

I’d be interested in hearing the opinions of those of you who read the whole thing.

Article – Survivalist congressman is ready for doomsday

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Deep in the West Virginia woods, in a small cabin powered by the sun and the wind, a bespectacled, white-haired man is giving a video tour of his basement, describing techniques for the long-term preservation of food in case of “an emergency.”

“We don’t really think of those today, because it’s so convenient to go to the supermarket,” he cautions. “But you know, you’re planning because the supermarket may not always be there.”

The electrical grid could fail tomorrow, he frequently warns. Food would disappear from the shelves. Water would no longer flow from the pipes. Money might become worthless. People could turn on each other, and millions would die.

Such concerns are typical among “survivalists,” a loose national movement of individuals who advocate self-sufficiency in the face of natural or man-made disasters, gathering online or in person to discuss the best ways to prepare for the worst.

What is atypical is that the owner of this cabin is Roscoe Bartlett, the longtime Republican congressman from Maryland. Over the past two decades, he has developed a following as one of the country’s premier proponents of preparedness against impending doom, even urging the more than 80 percent of Americans who live in urban areas to relocate.

Not as terrible an article as the MSM usually paints for guys like him.

Why it pays to compare prices

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

The local K-mart is going out of business. For the last couple weeks everything has been marked down further and further. I’ve been stopping by once a week to see if theres anything I need that has got a ‘must buy’ price. So, I go in there today and trot over to the first aid aisle. Can never have too much gauze, Neosporin, band aids and rolled gauze. I’m something of a snob, so I priced out the Johnson and Johnson stuff. Everything was 20% off the lowest marked price…okay, thats a fair discount but nothing to jump up and down about. I noted down the prices and figured I’d check and see what the other places in town were getting…so I could see if I was getting 20% off of an already good price or if I was getting 20% off of an overly expensive price. Headed over to Walgreen’s to compare prices and found that with the 20% discount from K-Mart the prices were pretty good….except that, as it turns out, this week Walgreens has buy-one-get-one-free on J&J first aid stuff….which essentially comes out to a 50% discount. So, even with the original price at Walgreens being slightly higher than K-Mart’s base price, it still comes out to a better deal going with the BOGO instead of K-Marts 20% off lowest price.

Which means that if I had given into my impulses and bought the stuff at K-Mart rather than check prices elsewhere, I’d’ve gotten less value for my scarce greenbacks.

Moral of the story: shop around, it pays.

Now….off to an ATM, and then to Walgreens to stock my lovely Hardigg Medical Chest.

MH and that non-existent ‘big government contract’

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

You guys remember about a year or so ago the folks at Mountain House told their small time dealers to go pound salt because MH was dedicating it’s output of #10 cans to other, larger vendors? The rumour at the time was that MH had a gigantic .gov contract that made MH put everyone else on the backburner (which would explain MH’s multi-million dollar capital improvements in manufacturing capacity) but denied that there was a big .gov contract that caused all this drama.

I, of course, didnt believe the denials.

And then I read this:

Many things were discussed, such as the void in the marketplace they left early last year when they slowed production of Mountain House to fulfill other private brand orders, including the military. They have since changed their focus and philosophy on order fulfillment, with the consumer Mountain House brand taking priority over all other orders.

So, yeah, there was a large .gov order alright. I knew it.

Look, in business you go where the money is. Guy wants to spend a couple hundred million bucks with you on one sale, well, the guys as Steve’s Camping Store might get their order pushed to the bottom of the list….but MH really froze their small dealers out with virtually no apologies or explanations. MH makes some great stuff, and I’ll continue to buy it as I need, but I’n, spreading my net further to other brands.

But, it’s nice to know I was right.

Fuel rotation musings

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Another weekend, another five-gallon fuel swap. I dunno how you rotate your fuel, but here’s how we do it around here. All fuel is in the ‘Euro/NATO’-style cans. The fuel is treated with stabilizer. The cans are tagged with the date of storage. The cans are then stored in a safe outdoor location. After more than a year, the fuel is rotated into the vehicle’s regular fill ups. Head to the gas station, put one can of gas in the rig, top off with fresh gas from the pump. The empty can is then refilled at the gas station and fuel stabilizer is added. Back to base, and the can is tagged, dated, and stored.

The details:

‘Euro/NATO’-style cans – Ive used the plastic cans, I’ve used the metal Blitz cans, and I’ve uses the NATO-style cans. (I haven’t used the Scepter plastic cans but I’m really leaning away from plastic fuel containers.) In my experience, the NATO cans are the best choice. I dont bother using a spout with them, I paracord a $2 gas funnel to each can. The NATO cans get painted every so often if theres signs of rust or chips in the paint. The cans seal up tight, are easy to handle, and used to be fairly inexpensive. Seems like the source these days is off-road/expedition specialty websites. The cans aren’t cheap, but whats it worth to you to have gasoline in a crisis?

Stabilizer – Two names top the chart: Stabil and PRI-G. I went with PRI-G after reading some reviews and first-hand reports. I have stored gas with the PRI-G stabilizer for almost two years and when that gas was finally used I noticed no change in vehicle performance. Stabil is easier to find, but for my money I’ll make the extra effort and get the PRI -G. Buy the big jug that treats 512 gallons. Why? Sometimes this stuff can be hard to find (like after their facility in La. got wiped out in Hurricane Katrina, so have enough on hand that you dont need to buy any for a few years.
.

Date tagging – Here’s the post about it. TL;DR? I cut a square from an empty pop can, scrive the date on it, and paracord it to the gas can. Since the tag is metal, and the date is carved into the metal, there is no problem with the date tag disintegrating or becoming illegible due to weather and sun.

If you don’t store extra fuel and don’t know how to go about it, this might be useful to you. It may not be the best way, but it’s how we do it around here and it seems to have worked pretty well so far. So: buy the good quality cans, fill with fuel, treat with stabilizer, date the cans, store them out of the weather (in a corner of your yard in a ‘doghouse’ structure would work great, and rotate with fresh gas when you fill your vehicle.)

As I said, I haven’t been as diligent as I should about gas rotation and the gas in storage was around two years old….but treated and stored properly it appears to perform just fine. When we need to outrun the zombies, or buy gas at 3AM when all the stations are closed, we’ll have that extremely valuable resource available to us.

And, before I forget, I want to repost something I think is extremely important about fuel rotation in a non-crisis:

The trick to this whole process is that you dont fill the truck from the cans until you are at the gas station. Why? Because if you fill it up at home you’ll be tempted to take the empty cans and throw them in the corner and say “Ah, I’ll fill them up next time” and then the world comes to an end and you’re starting your apocalypse three five-gallon drums short. So…fill the truck at the pump using the cans and then refill the cans at the pump. At least, for someone with my lack of self-discipline I find that to be the method that works best.

Seriously, man….there should never be an empty gas can in your world.