Relevant and interesting if you’ve never heard the story.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-feather-heist-180968408/

Your mistake is in what you are making your comparisons to. You can’t compare your solid wood bookcase to an Ikea cardboard bookcase, you need to compare it to the fancy brands that actually do make things from solid wood.

The rare occasion that “the thing” ends up being exactly what you needed is incredible, though.

Costco sells them as dog treats

This book describes it well, I think, around page 32.

Tribe by Sebastian Junger

Basically, helping others keeps you sane.

That sounds awesome. There seems to be a bit of a gulf in investment between getting a few panels to charge a backup battery or run some devices while camping, and actually doing a proper home integration. I’m in the midst of that gulf where I can generate more than I can easily store and use later, so I’d like to find some worthwhile uses for direct use of solar energy.

Don’t know if you’ve seen it before, but here’s an interesting article about direct solar.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/

Did you manually switch it on once your battery storage was full?

What kind of heating element did you use for the water? What type of control system to send power to it?

I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. Do you think it would be fair to say that for your average gardener, using OP seeds would make it easier to save them?

Crossbow bolts and modern arrows are not something you could produce more of in an apocalyptic scenario. A trad bow can use wooden arrows, but producing arrows capable of taking down large game is quite a challenge, and not something you can just go out and do in a pinch with a pocket knife and some sticks.

Arrows are reusable, but as someone who bow hunts, 100 bullets would probably last longer for me than a dozen arrows. If you miss your target, you can easily lose an arrow, or break it on a rock, break it on bone, break it by hitting your own arrow. Damaged arrows are really dangerous to try to use.

I see where you are coming from, but I think there are better ways to handle those issues than blanket tariffs. For example, you can get clothes from Bangladesh for cheaper than Norway because Bangladesh pays workers much less, (probably) has much lower environmental regulations, and the focus is on price over quality.

Adding a tariff to goods from Bangladesh would not improve the goods, it would just squeeze the business to cut even more corners to remain competitive, and likely put a lot of poor people out of work. Additionally a tariff on goods from a country is likely to be retaliated.

If the end goal is reducing production of garbage products at great impact to the environment and the workers, laws can focus specifically on those factors. We already place antidumping and counterveiling duties on goods that we deem are priced with unfair business practices, why not do more of the same for unfair labor practices, or environmental practices?

If someone can pay Ethiopian farmers a fair wage to produce landrace coffee (where it grows natively), and the environmental costs of shipping it to the US are accounted for, I don’t think it should be arbitrarily upcharged relative to monocrop coffee grown in a narrow band of expensive former rainforest in Hawaii.

Cliven bundy has a proven track record of using whatever platform he’s given to promote vile extremist views. Baker creek giving him a platform to speak is either negligent, if they are claiming they never once googled his name, or an indicator of support for his views.

I lean towards the second interpretation. On the speaker agenda, he’s referred to as a “land rights activist”, indicating that that is a specific topic they knew he would discuss, and they didn’t just hear about him as a random watermelon farmer.

Looking at the speaker before him, too, they run a group that thinks you can just come down with a case of autism from eating GMOs and cure yourself with organic food, and they are also 5g conspiracy theorists. You don’t accidentally put those types of people together.

When called out about it, they basically defended their choice to invite him, even though they could have disavowed him.

Seconding seed savers exchange. Most (all?) of their seeds are open pollinated. For anyone who doesn’t know what this means, it basically means that you can save seeds to regrow the next year.

Many types of seeds that you can buy do not enable this because they aren’t true to seed, or in the case of some gmo plants, they might be infertile.

When a hybrid plant is made, the genes are basically unstable. Remembering back to learning punnet squares in biology class, the offspring (seeds) from a hybrid plant can have a different mix of genes from the parent plants. For example, your hybrid tomato bred from one parent that had disease resistance but bad tasting fruit and another parent that had good fruit but susceptible to disease would give you a mix of offspring that can be like either parent, the hybrid, or the worst of both parents. Sometimes, over time, you can pick only three “good” ones and make sure they are only pollinated by other “good” ones by bagging flowers and hand transferring pollen. With open pollinated plants, none of that is necessary.

I hear you on the streaming sticks. 10 years ago, you could throw a Chromecast in your suitcase, plug it into a hotel TV, and cast anything you wanted from your phone. Now, if you try to do that, you have to set the Chromecast up through the Google home app, tell it what “room” it’s in, but then you can’t cause you arent at your “home”, so you have to set up a new “home”, and then that doesn’t usually work, so you just quit and read a book instead.

As a non Australian, I didn’t know wittenoom, but I’m pretty sure I know of it from the old videos of asbestos shoveling competitions that went around a few years back.

I think the smallest Australian town I know is oodnadatta, but I don’t know why I know it. I also had to look up if “nullarbor” was a city, or just a place name, so idk if that counts.

Oregon trail, yes, Oregon city, no. I remember learning that it went from independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley. If I had to guess where I thought it ended, I would have said Portland.

Do you use one that is actual chain, or braided wire? I’ve used the braided wire saws, and I like how tiny/light they are, but I’ve never used one of the chain style saws to see if the weight/volume increase is worth it.

I think there’s only 2 ways to actually kill a cast iron pan. Dropping from a height that causes the brittle metal to break, or putting lead in it. Obviously no one puts lead in their cooking vessels, but small pots are/were used to melt lead to pour in bullet molds, so if you find an old used pot, it’s good to check for lead.

Also, ceramic linings can get chipped.

You can mistreat bare cast iron horribly, never seasoning it, washing it in the dishwasher, or whatever, and it won’t get irredeemably damaged.

It’s a real baader-meinhoff phenomenon: once you notice them, you notice that every gym has them.

They keep coming out with fancier models, but the 5200 still reigns supreme. Who needs programs on a blender?