That’s exactly the distinction. Consumerist living comes from high level integration and highest levels of industrialization. Pins worth half a penny manufactured in dies worth tens of thousands of dollars, cycled in presses worth far more, then sent on trans oceanic voyages. If you aim to duplicate that kind of refinement independent of the system you will always lose, costs will be too high in some way. Also the integrated manufacturing process society isn’t the model to follow. Yes, it’s more “efficient”, whatever that means. Look at antique farm equipment, often made to run for decades with simple greasing, and blacksmith repairable parts.
But what are we aiming for as individuals? A warm, safe house, preferably paid for as it’s built, a supportive and stable community, a secure supply of trustworthy food. Electric lighting, hot and cold running water, and enough power to wash clothes, pump water, perhaps electric welding and power tools.
Our commodity culture leaves people in flux, in destroyed anonymous communities. Our food system is corrupt insecure and questionable. People pour their working lives into paying the debt of their house and the vehicles they need to drive to work.
Our lives can be greatly simplified and probably end up with higher quality and greater individual benefit. I am amazed with how corporate values have become societal values. People aim for a life of leisure, idolizing the lives of the rich. In the world of our grandparents people were judged positively on how much they worked. So it’s not surprising that urban people trying to go back to the land will be disappointed (and their peers won’t approve). They’ve bought into a whole bill of goods that leaves many materially rich but emotionally cheated, and without a frame of reference to understand.
Gary, that is well said ! ! I would like to add that our work should also be our entertainment. Now a days people have strange worthless activities that they call leisure entertainment. I want to enjoy my work.
Thanks Jeff. Yes, exactly, our culture is very imbalanced, we put effort into “pass times”, when work and making a real life was always our source of fulfillment and challenge. People’s work, life, and sense of self were all the same thing, they did it because they believed it, they did it for their families and their communities, they did it because it was who they were.
Now most often we dislike or resent the paid work we are forced into by the system, or it causes us real physical and emotional harm. And too often harm to others and the world itself. We’ve become little corporate enterprises in our own minds, everything measured in terms of profit and loss, compared to corporate scales of production and priorities. Glowing screens, first person shooter games and contrived challenges like mountain biking are meant to replace the meaningfulness of a real life, and of course fall short.
I like to say there will be plenty of time to rest when I’m dead… And, I don’t feel highly beholden to the central tenet of accumulating the most dollars, life can’t be equated to dollars, no matter how often we are told it does. Nobody thinks a life is a fair trade for what an insurance policy or court will award for its loss. I feel to have enough to engage with the corporate system and larger society seems good enough.
I would like to know and I’m sure Mike LaRossa would also’’’’’’’’’ what rod do you use to weld ‘‘rust’’? I have the best results with ‘‘fence’’ wire. TomC
If you’re talking arc welding, a 6011 electrode has an intense arc that will burn through rust, paint whatever. Of course it’s always better to grind everything clean if it’s a critical weld.
Methane digesters biodigesters need an everyday temp of at least 90 f. To make burnable methane. Either that or figure a way to heat the digesters. Built one a few yrs. back all I ended up with was about 60 gallons of liquid organic fertaliser. That a local farmers took and used then asked for more and how did I make it. He said his garden was exceptional that yr.
The key phase there is supposed to. When we where milking 120 head of cows we looked into this for the waste back in the 80s there was a big push to make farmers do this and go to liquid waste system as a standard. The bottom line was up here in New England the winter time temperature is just too low and you have to heat it. The put it in the ground has its own issues. Some places have very strict rules about what you can have in the ground both because people might fall into something ground bases if the cover fails and because of confined space issues. I think it is the LA waste management system in California which has done several documentaries on their plant and how the methane recovery is amazingly high at that plan and only lowers their power demand by something like 50% but they can’t generate more power then they use. I could be wrong they might get 80% of the plants power it was years ago I watched that video. But unless you live in a warm Climate methane from waste is not efficient. That is what i remember and it was one of the reasons we decided you couldn’t do large scale farming up here. One of many factors in the 80s and 90s stacked against farming up here.
Someone once sayd in a youtube video that he is much more keen to gasify biomass to make woodgas when he needs it and as much as he needs it, thain burrying shit in the ground and waiting for a miricle
We had a nice visit from Larry Graves and his wife last week as they were on their way home to south west Mississippi . They had been to Kentucky to get a 97 dodge ram 5.9 that he plans to wood gas . ( very nice truck ) This will be his second wood gas truck , he is now driving a 96 dakota daily and has logged 25,000 miles.
I took Larry for a ride in a couple of my trucks and he knew exactly what was going on as he has been DOW for a while
Larry ,
Keep us posted on the new build and thanks for coming by .
I have been intrigued by the possibility of biogas. I feel it could fit well with a balanced self sufficiency. If feed stock exists, ie a small farm, it should be entirely possible to provide safe methane gas for cooking, perhaps enough for hot water. Thinking a little bigger perhaps enough to occasionally run a small engine.
They do say the waste product of a digester is high quality fertilizer, also attractive.
I found the Chinese seem to be producing practical units for cool climate use.
Definitely a digester needs heating to work here, and won’t work at all during the winter. Insulated ground burial and larger size could work.
Once when sitting fishing at a flood diversion spillway on a large lake here on a beautiful calm summer day we saw the water begin to bubble, then boil. Then a giant mass of rotted cattails rose to the surface like a sea monster. The spring flood in the spillway had scoured and deposited a bed of organic matter that then fermented even in the cool water, possibly insulated and gathering heat from the reaction. I wish I had a flaming arrow.
I was impressed thinking about the fuel potential anyways.
Most early American pioneers were homesteaders, but not all homesteaders were pioneers.
That all goes back to the “definition” question. What is a “homesteader”. Lots of people equate old timey ways to homesteading. I guess because a lot of old timers were homesteaders. But maybe it has more to do with some set of principles lived out. Maybe it has an element of alternative-ness. ??? If simplicity is part of the definition, then buying cheap Chinese stuff at Harbor Freight could be the definition…as well as flipping a light switch or pushing the microwave button… Simplicity often dictates the use of my T190 rather than my plow horse. And my Dodge Dakota rather than my buggy.
In my experience there is a sweet spot where pragmatism tempered by principle rules and we can take advantage of the best of both without being slaves to either. Some people say that’s cheating. But I find no paradox in driving my buggy while using a cell phone, or having both the skid steer and the horse on a logging job. To me they are all just tools, the usefulness of which should be maximized. I had a friend friend over the other day that laughed when I used my old flip phone to call one of the boys inside the house to bring a tool down to the creek. But that, as it turned out, was the most efficient way at the time, of sending the message that 200 yards… I guess it is kind of strange to think of how far that signal traveled just to get 200 yards up the hill, but that’s the beauty of the modern age…Some people live in an idea that the beauty of another age was more beautiful than the beauty of this one. Maybe so, I didn’t live in that one. So I’m stuck in this one. Fact is, I’m pretty glad to be here and not there.
I’ve been reading the posts about working and quality of living. They are great, and inspirational. The complexity of our economic system demands specialization. Most people only have one narrow area of specialization. The inroads of automation and oursourcing are erasing the employment of MANY specialists.
The Industrial Revolution is working it’s way up the “ability ladder”. GOV and finance are starting to catch on to the fact that they are greatly threatened by the blockchain. Our systemic complexity is our weakness. Read “The Collapse of Complex Societies” Tainter.
Since I live in SoCal, it was obvious that I needed to chose a new place to hunker down. I picked a place in Western Oregon. There are a LOT of requirements to surviving with a minimum of interaction with the State and the banks. My spring up on the hill puts out 7,000 gal. of pure water every day. Since it is “surface water”, the State will probably leave me alone. I have bottom land next to the Coquille river. It is easier to farm if you have unlimited water and good soil.
Next, I needed a long growing season. The less food that I have stored, the less I will lose. There are apple trees everywhere. We run the apples through a french-fry grater and feed the poultry. The hills are full of feral cattle and also “axis” deer. Their is no season on either.
I built a dune-buggy / pickup truck based on the Subaru 4 wd wagon drivetrain. It has low transfer case and I can haul back game without having to butcher it up in the hills.
I built a 3X6X6 underground pit BBQ so that I can cook up to 25 lb. pieces.
The river runs both salmon and steelhead. Some IDIOT introduced some kind of bass and the salmon fry aren’t doing too well.
All in all, I tried to set myself up well so that it wouldn’t be too hard to survive.
Yes, I’m still in SoCal holding down a job. I need all the resources I can get.
I still have to pay property taxes and stuff like that.
I have a guy on the property who is looking after things. I’m taking stuff up there next weekend. Might as well see the eclipse while I am there.
ITM has the best vids on the economy that I have ever seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM68ZO-XUTw
The Chinese manufacture link I shared earlier, send a heating pad with their digesters to heat in the winter. They build them to act as greenhouses and tell you to set them so they get lots of sun. You will find that they make septic tanks and sell concrete forms for the ones that go in the ground. I ordered one two months ago and received it last week. We’ll being setting it up this winter.
It had to do with nitrates leaching into water supplies. There was a huge crackdown on nitrates and excess nitrogen period.
California tapped landfills. Which is pretty common now. Our local one does it, and GM’s Orion Assembly where they make the Bolt, uses landfill gas to power part of their plant. I think they have a couple of others as well.
California also has some municipalities that are working on various systems for lowering energy for water treatment facilities ie sewage. The majority of the cost of water treatment is the energy bill. It is just energy intensive, and it is based on a process developed 100 years ago. There are a couple of companies with systems that have just been developed and on the market, but it is a pretty conservative market.
The UK is way ahead in recovering energy from poo though. They have a recent study, where scottland claims they can heat glasglow through the winter with the heat from the sewer pipes. (cost effective in the short term probably not.) But they have several places where they are recovering methane as well.
As far as methane production, is is a low energy ballgame, and hard to get it to pay for itself if you buy the system. In a way it is kind of like thermal solar collection. If you build it out of scrap, it makes sense, but to buy a commercial off the shelf system. it can take too long to pay for itself (some of this may have changed in the last 5 years, I haven’t looked at system costs in a long time.)
We have office meetings and parties every month here at the compound which leaves us with a lot of food waste. There is not a lot we can do with it for liability reasons and I always hate seeing the waste. My wonderful lady doesn’t want a compost pile, so this was a way to have it. It maybe one of those things that makes me feel good (ROI), but it is also something that is doing good. I plan on using the liquid waste to fertilize our up coming garden and use in the yard. I have a Fig, Nectarine, lemon, orange, and pear tree(s) in the yard. I’ve tried some other editable landscaping but the deer have made short work of that.
I think digestors are a major step up from a compost pile especially in the attract critters and the wifey-test categories. cost effective is sometimes secondary. Some of the tumbler compost systems sell for like 300-500 dollars and I can’t imagine those are very cost effective either, but they look and operate nicer then most homemade ones.
However, where I grew up we had once a month take your trash to the town hall, and there is no way, you want to keep leftover food waste hanging around for a month as it smells and attracts critters. Putting it down the garbage disposal creates wear on it, and can create septic tank issues so you can start to justify the cost that way too.
And, I don’t feel highly beholden to the central tenet of accumulating the most dollars, life can’t be equated to dollars, no matter how often we are told it does. Nobody thinks a life is a fair trade for what an insurance policy or court will award for its loss. I feel to have enough to engage with the corporate system and larger society seems good enough.
