08:03 – The Netflix Fairy, AKA our friends Mary and Paul, showed up this morning and left Sons of Anarchy S3D4 at our door.
For the last three months, the ECB has been buying worthless eurozone sovereign bonds, nearly all Italian but some Spanish, at a rate of $40 billion to $50 billion a month. Despite that, bond yields have continued to climb. This morning, Italian bond yields touched 6.7%, just short of the 7% level that toppled Greece, Ireland, and Portugal into receivership. On the current trajectory, Italian bond yields should pass 7% in the next week or two.
There’s nothing magical about that 7% number other than its effect on market sentiment. If history is any guide, once Italian yields hit 7% we’ll enter a vicious circle, with higher yields causing panic and panic causing still higher yields. If (when) Italian yields hit 7%, don’t be surprised if they rapidly begin skyrocketing into the 10% and even 15% range. At that point, Italy quickly loses all access to the markets, because no one considers yields in that range to be sustainable. And the ECB is dropping loud hints that its patience is about exhausted and it will soon stop buying Italian bonds. Without that prop, yields will skyrocket even faster. Once it becomes obvious that Italy cannot survive without being bailed out, it really is game over for the euro.
09:56 – I’m investing in tinned food, a shotgun and a farmhouse on a remote Scottish island. We’re all doomed. This guy may be exaggerating, but not by much.
I wonder how Paul feels about being characterized as a “fairy”? 😉
He’s bigger than I am, but I’m meaner.
But he’ll have Mary protecting his six. Are you THAT mean? 😀
I’m less disturbed by the use of the word “fairy” than I am that Mary and I are now, apparently, to be spoken of in the singular. Perhaps I should have been paying more attention during the ceremony.
It was fairy-like, though. I dropped it off meaning to email him when I got to work (it was very early) and forgot. Glad he found it.
As to the article about a Scottish house article, it seems interesting to me that at a casual reading, it appears Greeks are sending money out of the country to banks and countries that will turn around and lend them money to prop them up.
I’d love to have the farmhouse but I’d rather it be in Appalachia.
You have a point.
If Paul was really, really angry with me, enough to physically assault me, I’d be cautious but neither fearful nor in much doubt about the outcome.
If Mary was really, really angry with me, I would flee in terror, change my name, and enter WitSec.
Wither Italy?
Italy Govt Bonds 10 Year Gross Yield
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/gbtpgr10:IND/chart
Singular? I mentioned both of you because I wasn’t sure who’d actually dropped it off. I asked Mary to get it for us originally, then discussed it with you. It wasn’t there (I’m almost sure) when I took Colin out at 0645, but it was there around 0800 the next time I took him out. Given that Mary often runs at oh-dark-thirty, I thought maybe she’d dropped it by on her way home from her run. I suppose I could have said, “Our friend, Paul or Mary, …” but that construct parses oddly.
Oh, it’s not just Greeks doing it. Despite the fact that the article only speculated that Italians were doing the same, they are in fact doing so, no question. As are individuals and companies from France, Belgium, Spain, and the rest of the southern tier. And not just to EU banks outside the southern tier. Big US banks are actually getting so many new accounts being created by EU individuals and companies that they’re now paying negative interest on deposits, literally. They actually don’t want any more cash.
As to the farmhouse, I agree with you. When Barbara retires, we’ll probably buy a place much farther out from the city, something on one floor with an outbuilding I can use for business. But I do think it’s a good idea to have food on hand. You may have noticed that we bought about 20 pounds of peanut butter on our last Costco run. And I keep looking at those 50-pound bags of flour. I wonder how long flour can be stored, perhaps in wastebasket liners in those Home Depot 5-gallon buckets with an anti-oxidizer disc added. I know how to store wheat, but I’ve never looked into whether flour can be stored long-term.
Wither, Italy.
There, fixed that for you.
I prefer this house:
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/post/4956385434/the-first-zombie-proof-house
Very nice, but of course zombies are only one of the things we have to worry about. I actually wrote about our anti-zombie plans back in May:
The problem with flour is insects. In particular, there is a small moth that likes to lay its eggs in flour. We’ve had flour in sealed plastic bags get infested – the little buggers apparently can gnaw through certain types of plastic. Possibly a thicker bag would have been ok, maybe something like a vac-pac bag.
Interestingly, we’ve never had a problem with flour in paper bags, like you get from the store. Maybe the store bags are actually proof against the critters? Seems odd, since the paper bags often don’t seem to be well-sealed.
In addition to the anti-oxidant disc, I was thinking about adding a small amount of 2-isopropyl-5-methylphenol (AKA thymol) to discourage anything from growing.
I actually wrote about our anti-zombie plans back in May
What? No silver bullets!
I think those are designed primarily for lycanthropes. Though, I suppose a well-placed silver bullet would work well on most anything that bleeds.
I’ve had problems with bugs in rice and ferret food, but not flour. I don’t think they eat through plastic, though! I have a stock of rice and legumes set aside, too. I give them both a hard freeze for a couple weeks before hermetically sealing them. I rotate the stock and both were fine after a couple years. Flours will last a couple years, too, though the flavor goes a little off. (I’ve kept it in mayonnaise jars for that long) Although an anti-oxidant will help, I’d suspect it won’t suck as much oxygen as the aging process puts out.
Thanks for fixing the link. Didn’t know it was wonky. If there’s a way to edit the template to expand on the “You may use these HTML tags and attributes” I would use them, but I find it really confusing for casual posting. Maybe I just need to make a series of nonsense posts to figure it out once and for all.
Whither Italy?
Let’s try that again, just so I get it down…
Whither Italy2?
I think those are designed primarily for lycanthropes.
Is that a new term for the Lone Ranger?
Third time is a charm — I wanted to directly link to the chart
Whither Italy? Chart of 10 year Govt Bonds
Bob,
You need to get to Utah to see how to stock up for the Armegeddon. Part of the LDS dogma is to lay in supplies for several years. They have stores and such that specialize in large quantities packaged for long term storage.
Well, I have a DVD with Mad Max II that may be appropriate to watch soon.
Our current favorite for preserving things is vacuum packing. We managed to pick up an old-but-solid vacuum-packing machine a couple of years ago. Solid metal – the case is nearly a centimeter thick – moving it is a bitch.
While you don’t get all the air out, you certainly get a huge reduction – which pretty much eliminates oxidation problems. As Jim points out, flour goes off after a while – and I’ll bet that is caused by oxidation of the oils. It’s one of the few things we have tried, but I’d bet that vacuum packed flour would last forever.
Goods going into the freezer always get vacuum-packed. Freezer-burn just doesn’t exist – you can keep things for years in the freezer, with absolutely no problem. Meat, berries, soups, blanched vegetables – really, anything. The biggest problem we have is labeling, as stupid as it sounds. We write a couple of words on a package, thinking we’ve described the contents. A couple of years later, we pull it out some mystery package, read the cryptic description and wonder, “what the heck is this stuff?”.
LOL, I second Brad’s suggestions for both a vacuum sealer and accurate labelling. Don’t know how many times I’ve pulled out a carefully preserved package of mystery meat from the freezer!
One can use a vacuum sealer on 5 gal. “pickle barrels” too. I’ve seen the trick written up, but I’m not THAT fanatic.
Brad, what are the details on your second-hand vacuum sealer? Mine is a FoodSaver, older model, and it won’t last very long. I hope it does, but I’d like a more robust model.
Are books like this helpful?
Handbook to Practical Disaster Preparedness for the Family
by Arthur T. Bradley
[Amazon.com Hyperlink]
RBT: Why aren’t you writing books like these? It sounds like it’s right up your alley.
Chad makes a good point! An Illustrated Guide to Survivalism would be very cool.
Think, gentlemen, think! RBT writes hands-on experimental books. His instructions would have the reader starting several limited pandemics to observe the usefulness of different preparations, or shooting up the neighbors in order to determine one’s optimal shotgun load.
I suppose I should try the vacuum packaging. This past year has been a bummer infestation of packaged meal and grains. Did not matter whether the contents were in paper or plastic (I put most everything in resealable plastic, anyway), the bugs hatched and managed to find their way out of the sealed bags and into the house. Much of it belonged to son and his girlfriend, who moved west to greener pastures at the beginning of summer and left those things for me — which I obviously did not use up quickly enough. The really terrible thing is that nothing hatching those animals was over 6 months past purchase. That is not much longevity.
The Telegraph article gave me a start. That guy Knowles is the spitting image of my late brother after his college graduation. If I can find the picture, I will try and post it somewhere. Scary.
I do not want to retire to remoteness. I already have friends with health problems related to aging, who have suffered from not being close to medical care. One was consigned permanently to a nursing home because of the delay in getting medical attention, and he is not even 65. Living a pioneer life has never appealed to me; my idea of camping is room service and Wi-Fi at the Hilton.
However, I do like Zombie House. I fully intend to build an earth-shelter house as a retirement home — which is basically that house sunk into a hill. Mine will be positioned so 2 sides will protrude, not just one. It will not be in the countryside, though. Must relieve myself of Tiny House, first.
Stu wrote:
“Bob,
You need to get to Utah to see how to stock up for the Armegeddon. Part of the LDS dogma is to lay in supplies for several years. They have stores and such that specialize in large quantities packaged for long term storage.
Well, I have a DVD with Mad Max II that may be appropriate to watch soon.”
Back in the Eighties when my organisation had Control Data mainframes I read about the LDS site that housed their backup data and so forth. CDC mainframes buried in the side of a mountain, every precaution taken. It wasn’t Cheyenne Mountain but they were serious about keeping their data safe. Probably wouldn’t have served against a direct hit from the Soviets though.
Ahh, Mad Max II. I thought Yanks called it the Road Warrior. I never get sick of that movie.
Chuck wrote:
“Living a pioneer life has never appealed to me; my idea of camping is room service and Wi-Fi at the Hilton.”
I’ve never been a fan of backpacking or low quality hotels/motels. Nowadays I won’t even look at a hotel that isn’t 4*. It’s not so bad out in the scrub though, I stayed at a 2* type motel in far northern Norway in 1990 and that was perfectly okay. But not in a city.
RBT wrote:
“Very nice, but of course zombies are only one of the things we have to worry about. I actually wrote about our anti-zombie plans back in May: …”
It’s well known that zombies have very poor taste in music, and one of the easiest ways to deter them is to play fine music like Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, Trumpet Voluntary, the Water Music and anything by the Carpenters, Barry Manilow, Tina Charles or Bertie Higgins. That’ll drive them off quick smart. So just have a panic button/s with some of that fine music preloaded and decent sized speakers and watch them run…
I wish the congresscritters would pay as much attention to the state of the economy as they do to the wishes of their RIAA/MPAA masters:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/the-stop-online-piracy-act-big-contents-full-on-assault-against-the-safe-harbor.ars
The Scottish place looks nice but no trees. WTF? Yeah, I know; they were consigned to building lumber and firewood circa 300 BC. Ditto much of western Ireland.
Our little bunker will be somewhere in remote Maritimes, probably northern Noveau Brunswick, which has basic industries, farming, hunting, and both freshwater and ocean fishing. A vast interior of forests and bogs and lotsa coastline. Adjacent to western Maine mountains. Locals are Acadian, English, Irish, Scottish and Miq-M’aq. Lotsa fellow Roman Catholics.
OFD’s battery is old-school for the most part, but OFD also likes to dabble in various other lethal manufactures and enterprises. At hand are the .12 loaded with Number Four Buck; my .41 S&W Mag, and my Taurus .357 snubbie with shrouded hammer loaded wid .38+P JHP. This is just for live biped primates with bad intent; zombies will have another little surprise, assuming any of them make it up this far from Megalopolis.
Music on da radio stations here is mostly crap, so I listen to either the basically Top Forty playlist of classical, preferably Baroque, or the classic/oldies stations. Same listening preferences as The Hag. He and I and Larry Coryell all take the position that there is nothing worth a shit after 1975, which is, coincidentally, when I got back from Uncle’s wars and came home to Aerosmith’s Dream On and a very snowy April.
Gonna have to convert some LP’s to CD’s and also burn some more CD’s of stuff I like. The radio stations ain’t gonna cut it no more.
Well, as long as the ammo holds out, my ZSU-23-4 ASG is deadly on zombies, but at about 60 rounds/sec of 23mm among the four barrels it chews through a pile of ammo pretty fast. But it scares zombies so badly they won’t get near it, even if they’re flying Warthogs.
Arrgh! It never pays to be too far behind the curve. Found myself a bit under the weather today and staying home, so I decided to use the extra time to update Rockbox on the trusty old iPod. In looking at my historical records, I had not done that since 9 Oct 2008. I was not too careful in looking at dates, but it turns out the update utility was revised only yesterday, and Rockbox itself, was updated only a month ago.
Needless to say, things did not go swimmingly. First of all, the update utility failed to make a backup of the old installation; I have an 18mb zip file that is completely empty. Lots of changes in 3 years, and my customized screen no longer works. Right off the bat, I see they have changed the picture size of my customized screen, and a lot of the codes to make it display various things, like artist, title, and times. What is more, the charging of the iPod has always used the actual iPod software, but now it uses Rockbox software, and the screen no longer glows dimly, showing me it is charging and confirming to me when I choose to eject the device, that it is okay to unplug. I knew that change was coming, but this is one case where Apple’s ways are better than Rockbox’s.
It still plays, and I will likely just try to figure out how to deal with the ‘now playing’ screen at a later date. As time went on, it was clear that the Rockbox group had made great strides in optimizing battery life, and I suspect 3 more years will have brought even further improvements. Although it is very disappointing that the lack of a backup keeps me from returning to the old installation. That was supposed to be possible.
My preferred alternative to vacuum packing is to use oxygen absorber sachets. Instead of pulling a vacuum before heat-sealing a bag of food, one just drops in a sachet. It makes for a bit larger package, but is quicker and easier.
Norm, I doubt your sachets will absorb the oxygen a pound of flour at room temp will put out in year.
Neither here nor there, but something (Public Health Policy) which interests me:
The fight for and against antibiotics
Well written and even handed. Spurs an interesting debate, I think. To what measure do we consent to proscription of market goods for the general welfare?
Jim
(hoping the html tags worked correctly!)
@Chuck: Ah, installing the latest and greatest. I just did that with the programming environment on my laptop. Silly me. I couldn’t connect to the version control server anymore – I just got a cryptic message about “null values”. After wasting a couple of hours, I re-installed the old version. I was really supposed to be producing an example program for my advanced students yesterday – instead I lost the morning to idiocy – so today is programming day…
I’ll have to check our vacuum packer when I get home tonight – no idea what model it is. My wife asked about commercial machines, but was budget-limited. The company had taken this one in trade when they sold some restaurant a newer machine. So they refurbished it, and sold it to us.
One valuable and well-respected information resource on prudent food (and other) storage is:
http://athagan.members.atlantic.net/PFSFAQ/PFSFAQ-1.html
He gives straight hard fact without the fervour, favour, and emotion often attached to this subject. It’s information-dense, but not so much so as to be mentally indigestible.
Why would flour emit oxygen? It’s primarily carbohydrates and protein, and there’s obviously no photosynthesis going on. I thought the problem in storing food was with oxidation, not reduction. I assumed that those anti-oxidant discs or packets were there just to absorb any oxygen in the air that was not displaced by solids when filling the storage container.
When it comes to caliber choice and survivalism, then I suppose you want to choose whatever is common. Since the catastrophic event will probably stop the manufacturing of new ammo, then you’re only going to be able to shoot what you’ve stockpiled, looted, and/or scavenged. So, for handguns, for example, I’d stick with 9mm and .45 ACP. Simply because if I kill a hostile and loot his corpse for ammo, that’s probably what he’s going to have on him.
The new .40 cal S&W is getting a lot of support since most of the law enforcement agencies have switched to it. It has a really nice punch too.
Vacuum sealer: There doesn’t seem to be a single reference on the Internet for our specific machine. This is the current model, which is a couple of generations newer – ours has good old-fashioned switches and rheostats on the control panel. You’ll see the price, and see why we wanted the used one…
I’m not so worried. I figure if I’m looting the body for ammo, I’ll also loot it for weaponry.
Geez, you guys are something else. Although I was never really a survivalist or whatever they call them now (preppers?), back in the day I did know a lot of the serious survivalists, including Pournelle and Mel Tappan’s group. They never worried me, but the guys who did were those who accumulated arsenals and thousands of rounds of ammo, but little or no food or other supplies. As one of them said to me (I think his name was Machiavelli), “guns will get you through times of no food better than food will get you through times of no guns.” I vowed then to be nowhere near those guys if the bell ever rang.
Ammo is cheap and stores forever. Walmart sells a 50 cartridge box of 40 S&W for $14. Keeping food is expensive and difficult!
Why would flour emit oxygen?
Yeah, that dawned on me while I was falling alseep last night. Got me wondering about what happens when oils go rancid. You’re right, the little packets must be to absorb the dead air.
I want brad’s vacuum sealer! 😀
Regarding the movie name, yes when it first came here it was retitled “Road Warrior” from Mad Max II as we never had Mad Max (I). It was also redubbed in our dialect.
RBT wrote:
‘As one of them said to me (I think his name was Machiavelli), “guns will get you through times of no food better than food will get you through times of no guns.” I vowed then to be nowhere near those guys if the bell ever rang.’
Yeah, but there’s no escape. They’ll find you.
Stu wrote:
“Regarding the movie name, yes when it first came here it was retitled “Road Warrior” from Mad Max II as we never had Mad Max (I). It was also redubbed in our dialect.”
Yeah, I saw it in the cinemas (several times) when it came out and the narrator had a normal accent. Then I watched it on tele and the narrator had this completely weird accent. Americans don’t talk that way, do they?
BTW Stu, did you like Mad Max I and III? The latter was watchable, the first was quite good but MMII takes the prize IMHO.
RBT wrote:
“…including Pournelle and Mel Tappan’s group. They never worried me, but the guys who did were those who accumulated arsenals and thousands of rounds of ammo, but little or no food or other supplies. As one of them said to me (I think his name was Machiavelli), “guns will get you through times of no food better than food will get you through times of no guns.” I vowed then to be nowhere near those guys if the bell ever rang.”
Aren’t these guys committing the fallacy of the excluded middle? Why not stock up on *both* food, etc., and ammo? If the balloon had ever gone up the people they were intending to steal from might have been just as well armed and capable.
“I vowed then to be nowhere near those guys if the bell ever rang.”
Wouldn’t it be better to be above them looking down with your best sniper rifle? Because you could think you’re nowhere near them and never know that you’re below them with a sniper rifle pointed at you.