Hi from DCFusor

Doug here.

Hey y'all and H/T to DoChen for showing me the site. I'm only an amateur PM bug, but expert in a lot of other things. Interesting life, some of which you can see here: www.coultersmithing.com

I currently run some forums here:
www.coultersmithing.com/forums

Under which are some threads about trading if you're interested. (look for the link at the lower right of the main page) That's what I do all day these days, but my passions are physics (fusion), gunsmithing (and competitive shooting), playing music...fast cars, women...and all the usual stuff guys do if they are lucky enough to be able to. I'm pretty lucky.

My own personal take on PM's is that it's good to hold them physically for certain situations - and I even use them in my lab here, but also good to trade around those core positions to get more fiat - perhaps to buy more physical with.

But I also believe that if you're sweating TSHTF sorts of issues, that you should have a real good (rotating) food stash, defensible land with water on it, skills, tools, stocks of all sorts of things that might be useful (medical supplies?) and so on. I believe just buying gold and stacking it is very short sighted and lazy - mentally and physically.

For whatever reason, I can't shake the vision of some jerk in an apartment in NYC sitting on his stack, as the building burns around him because the looters are out of control and there's nothing to buy with gold there anyway - the JIT supply chain is even more fragile than fiat money, you know. In that case, his gold is useless, and his gun is only good to stop the pain from being burned alive - readiness has many factors, depending on what end-case you're trying to be ready for, no?

Example:
I live on a productive farm, in the far boonies, with neighbors who are like minded. We all produce food, hunt, know how to shoot, and help each other - because we enjoy doing it. I own an on site machine shop and electronics shop. I know how to do minor surgery, and have a year's worth of *good* food stashed, along with other things. My land has 5 artesian springs on it.

I laughed out loud when I heard some bad-boy rap saying he wuz gunna take his high-cap 9 mm, kick off farmer brown and live like a king off the land if it all goes down.

Not going to happen - Farmer brown will just plug him, take any gold off him, and go back to farming...for the neighborhood. If someone comes along after TSHTF and expects to be king because he brought a stack - well, we have gold ourselves, why would we let you take our stuff or give us orders? Bring a hoe, some seeds, and some skills, you'll do better here - just one guy's opinion, but it's based on a long life here, after a previous long one in Wash DC. The thinking you pick up in a city only works there, and only is good for as long as that system is working, FYI.

We already don't even need *any* medium of exchange - we trade the products of our labor directly, that's the coin of this realm - and of course, it's all off-book and untaxed. Gold's nice, the women like it and it has uses, but...other things matter as well. Flame if you like - that's where I am and am coming from.

FWIW, my avatar is a view into my fusion reactor. The fusor and fusion are the purple stuff in the background. The blue is on a pinhole charged particle camera screen.

Welcome to the party, you fit right in.

Please accept my thanks DCFusor, and congratulations for becoming a member!

---

Condo-dwelling Bearing in southern suburbia offers up his TEOTWAWKI preparations:

-- adequate gold & silver
-- 8 gallons of water
-- approx. 15 cans/jars of food (other than what Mrs. Bearing normally has), some bulk food
-- guns & ammo
-- trade-able pharmaceuticals and some other medical supplies

[DoChen's grade in "Modern Survival Theory" class: D-minus...]

If we have a hurricane I am OK.

If we get a big bad EMP or other fast and big bad TSHTF, well, we're gone...

---

We do have the option of moving to PERU (my wife has close family there, they run our bearing import company) and living well there, depending on what goes down. The Third World does have lots of experience in non-optimized logistics (no "JIT") -- the food always makes it into Lima. There is plenty of food, but yes, it is POOR. And corrupt. Etc.

Don't get me wrong, I would rather be here. But, if it looks like wealth would be seized, we do have that option.

Welcome farmer brown!! BTW interesting avatar pic!!

Hi DCFusor, I think I recognise you from ZH!

I'm a bit of a high voltage hardware hacker also (and have stacked some parts for a fusor, when I'm not so busy). Welcome to PMBug from me.

Thanks guys! Glad to be here. If you do real hands-on work, you'd be welcome over in my forums too, h4rdware - but we do use real names over there, as part of the point of that place is to get any good ideas credited to their author, not some patent-mad corporation or general whack job trying to take credit they don't deserve. Some fairly heavy hitters are there.

I'll post on my food stash and plan in the appropriate forum here, DoChen. Much of what I do is quite practical for a southern suburbanite, more than you'd think at first, perhaps. And the food I stash is neither expensive or hard to want to eat, in general.
I figure that's a requirement, as I rotate through the stash to keep it fresh anyway.

FWIW, I'm off the grid, make all my own power, heat from my woodlot, all that kind of thing. But it's not because I'm some sort of greenie, though I'm fond of nature too. Just normal country living in the SW VA mountains.

It's all about having power, being free - over my own life, and whatever situation eventuates. I have just one bill - internet access. The less it costs you to live, the more you have left over for stacking, after all. And self reliance doesn't work well without some practice.

They named that power company right - where I live they are in charge of enforcing building permits. So, if you buy some raw land, as I did, then build on it - as far as the government is concerned, it's all barns or sheds...You only need a building permit if you want power company power at residential prices (and not have to pay for the poles), and then they get taxed as "dwellings". Ditto some other things like drilled wells, or on-site large propane tanks. So I skipped those (have springs after all, and a 20 lb propane tank runs a two burner stove over half a year), and live "close to the earth" but far from uhhhh, taxes.

That alone pays for the huge solar system by itself very very quickly (several times over by now) when you have four "barns" on the campus. Heh - they kinda painted themselves into a corner on that one! And as it works out, my power is a lot more reliable than that from the power co - when the wind takes out others power, they come over here to watch the TV and keep their food frozen. One by one, they're learning what's really important.

Welcome DCFusor! I see you are in Hokie country. My wife and I spent some time in Floyd, VA recently and really liked it alot.

wlocome dc fuser

I am in virginia too.
sounds like you are living my dream!
I am working at it little by little.
met a guy in oregon 15 years back that did his home the same way to get around the gov.
I am finding that people around me ar more willing to trade/barter more and more.
excellent read!
goldwood:clap:

Well, thanks, guys. If you're close, drop by for a beer sometime (or whatever).
I specialize in fun around here. Bring yur guns if the weather's nice, I own a range...tannerite is fine too. The neighbors only get upset if we have too much fun and forget to invite them too.

Let's see if this link works here

http://www.youtube.com/user/DCFusor#p/u/11/nKPClyLxMbI

Ah, no embedding - maybe someone can tell me how - I see it elsewhere.

[ame]http://youtu.be/nKPClyLxMbI[/ame]

Use the link provided for the specific video you want to show under the "share" tab.

And that's a tempting offer. Too bad I'm so far away or I'd take you up on it.

Well, PMBug, a journey of a thousand miles...you know. I'm not going anywhere soon (so I hope)!

Test video. Fun despite that the video is *way* over exposed, and and the audio is cutting out from wind...I'll get a better one like this now that I have a more "real" camera.
Sadly, I sold the Camaro today to get a Volt - seems like a lot better car for when there's no gas - I'm charging it with my excess solar power...neat little ride in its own right.

[ame]http://youtu.be/5dkTB2zF838[/ame]

Nice vid, DC.

That 200 mph gocart also had the nice benefit of sounding like a funnycar dragster when you start it up (at least through the ears of the video camera!). I was expecting to see a parachute pop out of the rear to help you come to a stop. :smile:

Thanks for sharing.

Yeah, that cracked me up too - it's not that impressive in real life - it's 200 mpg, not mph (it will go 50, though) - 8hp motorcycle engine. It IS fun to drive that thing. I have a better camera now (and won't be so stupid as to leave it set up for the dark and quiet like I had that one, for my fusion stuff).

But it's coming on winter now, and it wouldn't be as impressive a video without the foliage, not to mention kind of cold out there. Down in that bottom it was *dark*, but it looks a lot different in the vid. I feel really lucky to have amassed this land. After all, West Virginia is only "almost heaven" - this is the real deal, fer sure. Wildlife, water jumping out of the ground, fertile soil, cool neighbors...hardly any government...city dwellers think they have it made, or have it better, I'm almost willing to let them think that so they leave us alone.

I am about to do a video walkthough of my solar system, though, recently improved, with enough spare juice to charge the Chevy Volt I bought today.

When gasoline goes sky high or gone - I'll still be truckin...and it's a bitchin car in its own ways. Like driving a spaceship. Sneaky-quiet inside and out, reasonably quick (I drove it home at 85 mph), nice car - not some bastardized conversion with too many compromises, it's the real deal. Finally.

I guess that thinking goes into bunker talk here, so I'll make a thread there. Post-gasoline transport would seem like a worthy topic, eh?

DCRF, I too am a noob on this site, but a vet on others. There is a great deal of knowledge being shared on all of the survival/PM sites, and with a little common sense, you will separate the wheat from the chaff. DCRB is one of many with wisdom. With knowledge of markets, market conditions and statistics, DCRB works within the maze of our current financial paradigm, and makes a good living at it. Me? I am a flyspeck on an elephants ass. I do what it is that I do, and I survive. Count only on your own instincts, will to live, and common sense, and you will do well......probably even thrive.

DCFusor said:

Yeah, that cracked me up too - it's not that impressive in real life - it's 200 mpg, not mph (it will go 50, though) - 8hp motorcycle engine. It IS fun to drive that thing. I have a better camera now (and won't be so stupid as to leave it set up for the dark and quiet like I had that one, for my fusion stuff).

But it's coming on winter now, and it wouldn't be as impressive a video without the foliage, not to mention kind of cold out there. Down in that bottom it was *dark*, but it looks a lot different in the vid. I feel really lucky to have amassed this land. After all, West Virginia is only "almost heaven" - this is the real deal, fer sure. Wildlife, water jumping out of the ground, fertile soil, cool neighbors...hardly any government...city dwellers think they have it made, or have it better, I'm almost willing to let them think that so they leave us alone.

I am about to do a video walkthough of my solar system, though, recently improved, with enough spare juice to charge the Chevy Volt I bought today.

When gasoline goes sky high or gone - I'll still be truckin...and it's a bitchin car in its own ways. Like driving a spaceship. Sneaky-quiet inside and out, reasonably quick (I drove it home at 85 mph), nice car - not some bastardized conversion with too many compromises, it's the real deal. Finally.

I guess that thinking goes into bunker talk here, so I'll make a thread there. Post-gasoline transport would seem like a worthy topic, eh?

Click to expand...

Oops my bad, typo, I meant to say 200mpg. A 200 mph gocart would be a thing to, er, NOT to behold. At least I wouldn't want to ring out such a contraption!

I have gone that fast, in the 2010 SS Camao I just traded in for that Volt (sigh, but I'm too old for that thing, anymore). I had a part time cop working here part time as a programmer, and he set it up on RT 81 with two state guys (one ahead, one behind). It was certainly too exciting for this old fart - and I used to race, pro.

We drove away from the guy behind (crown vic interceptor) like he had just hit the brakes, and caught up to the front guy (a couple miles ahead) like he was parked in what seemed like seconds, and his radar said we were going right around 45 mph faster than his 163 mph top speed at the time. I have my guy sitting in the shotgun seat, and he's bouncing up and down going "you've still got half a grand on the tach and it's pulling hard, lets see what it can REALLY do." Yeah, right. I was having a heart attack and looking for the flaps and rudder and stuff. That's just too fast to go on the ground, even on a major superhighway (and we'd lost our "protection" anyway). The car was fine - plenty downforce and so on - I was not. Its next pilot will have to find out where it gives up.

I should add that this one, serial number 341, wasn't stock, quite. Gm gave me a "Special version" and then Tom Henry super-tuned it. About 500 hp and an extra grand on the rev limiter...

A little late, but welcome anyways!

Thanks for the welcome. Not that late, I've not been here long myself. Ancona, I've been reading on the self-sufficient thing since I started homesteading here in about '80, and frankly, all too much of it isn't really from experience, and/or depends on you being young, vigorous, and willing to tolerate anything - or a too-specific situation (my own experience has of course the same limitation). I can kinda do that if I must, but I'm finding that with a little more experience and refinement, the stuff you can do, you can do really well with very little sweat. Though I started with a tent on the first half acre of this place and built from there, I doubt I could pull it off again so easily (I was younger then!), and that wasn't exactly the right word, it wasn't easy.

One thing I find astonishing is that after all these years of trying to be as self sufficient as possible, I'm still not - not even close. I have power, water, heat handled pretty well, and can even make most of my own replacement parts for that stuff. Food, I get up to about 30% of off the land, could go higher, but I'd run out of game at some point (or eat a lot less), and really have to work at it to put more land under till (not so easy in the mountains, rocks and slopes, not as bad as New England, but not like river bottom either).

What I HAVE managed to get going, is that the world could end "as we know it" and it'd take about a year to notice that at this point - time to adapt to whatever the new conditions happen to be. I shot for the stars, but got the moon. At least I got that far. From here on in, it's kind of been a race to automate it more so it gets easier as fast as I get older and weaker. (and lazier). And just keep it all fixed and going well.

Even that little water-getter I posted about elsewhere - beats the snot out of sneaker-net with gallon jugs down to the creek (1/4 mile and 160 feet below here).
I used to get 2 gal a day, and lived on that fine (but I might not have smelled too good sometimes). Now I'd take an hour and be sweating blood pressure for that little chore, instead of running.

DCFusor, holy-moly, 200 mph in a car!? On I-81? That's is a fairly hilly and winding road for an Interstate, I would not even want to go 90 on it...

The fastest I ever drove was 110 in a Toyota Camry in West Texas (I-10), decades ago. Yes, it was a rental. And even 110 was too fast for me to be comfortable, I have read that if your tire blows out doing 90, you're toast.