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June 9, 2013 - Clif High
44:06
20130609 – Clif High Audio #36
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Time Text
Good morning.
It's uh 6.07 a.m. on June 9th, year 2013.
Heavily chemtrailed late night here in the Pacific Northwest.
Feeling my age too.
Sort of starting over here at 60.
Um, and it's led to a whole lot of different changes.
Got a really wonky knee.
I'm gonna go and use the uh little mini trampoline and bounce out some of the tension in it.
I've been working my old flatbed trailer that I got from some um loggers up in Elma.
It's a 20-foot long uh trailer they used to use to haul um hay and logs and stuff on their farm.
And I uh converted it to haul the umiac.
Now I'm uh pulling off all the umiac hauling gear and converting it back to a flatbed trailer.
Well, it's already flatbed, but I mean a non-submersible.
And because it's a dual axle uh that'll hold 10,000 pounds, and um putting some sides and stuff on it so that I can haul poles for our uh platform and yurt construction.
Yurts are gonna ship here on July 9th, and so I've got to get uh get my act together.
Anyway, I've been uh so for uh spent uh about six hours, seven hours last couple of days uh using my big Milwaukee drill and and driving um three eighths inch holes through the sides of the uh steel undercarriage on the trailer so I can bolt on the sides and the angle and such, I've had to use my knees to push the drill through.
Not a good thing to do when you're sixty, let me tell you.
Boy, does that hurt those tendons.
It's not the first one.
It's always that last one at the end of that seven hours that get you.
Reminds me of the old um uh green chain fallers rule, rules of thumb.
This is something that they uh that uh Nicholas uh Talib talks about in anti-fragility uh frequently as rules of thumb.
There's this old uh saying if you're working green chain, green chain is a term uh that they use out here, which um when I grew up uh, as I say, when I came up as a kid, um this was a resource uh economy, resource-based economy.
So if you were willing to take the risks and uh you were physically fit enough, you could go on out and make a living uh in the resource harvest um uh business, which we have many different resources around here.
We have fishing, mining, and so on.
I was working forestry for a while in what's known as green chain, and green chain is the falling to the um uh transport chain.
Okay, so basically it's from falling the the tree in the forest until it is actually delivered to a transporter uh into the more infrastructure area.
So a green chain in some area might include sloughs uh that go for miles, it might include several different ponds to get the logs from one side to another, uh, to get them to another river, that kind of thing.
So sometimes green chains could be quite extensively long.
A more modern version of green chain would be a helicopter, and so a helicopter would take half a dozen or more logs in a very um remote area and haul them in, and that would be part of the green chain.
Now I've worked several green chains, some of which were short.
You know, you'd have a boom that would haul the trees up sa the top of the hill, and you'd be able to get it onto a um commercial log hauler at the top of the hill.
So basically your chain was very short, and you only had to work the falling up until the um point that it was retrieved.
But that's what I did as a kid, was I worked in the green chain uh resourced harvest.
Oh, we still have some of that around here.
And uh as you may know, we've got um a lot of trees.
A lot of trees in the area.
So um that was one of the reasons I uh decided to settle on uh pole foundation for our yurts.
Uh a lot of other reasons, which I'll go into in a in another discussion about the details.
This is more of a uh sort of a catch up to date and and uh bitch and moan about my aching knee and all the other crap that's pissing me off.
Um you know, a lot of things pish off when you're old and you got the when you're hurting.
When you don't hurt, hmm, you can take a uh, you know, your your attitude's a little bit more generous to the faults of the planet.
Anyway, though, you know.
Uh so i it's rather um uh uh not daunting.
Uh what would be the word?
Well, it's interesting and it's challenging.
And uh there's some level of trepidation.
I don't really feel uh fear failure because failure is uh just when you decide to stop um uh in your attempt.
You know, it's it's never really a um uh a finite state that's imposed on you from outside.
It's entirely a personal thing.
You know what they say, you know, get knocked down nine times, get up ten, and you haven't failed.
And in Aikido, it's always, you know, um end well.
That's all that matters is that you end well.
Doesn't matter how you start, doesn't matter what the big the beginning or the middle are like, as long as you end well, you're doing good.
And if you didn't end well that first time, start it over again.
So anyway, though.
So that's kind of what we're doing is we're starting over again.
So I'm getting my trailer ready to uh haul these poles.
Because we've got to do all the work ourselves.
Can't afford a um self-loader, uh, and most of the uh most of the self-loading uh uh semi trucks wouldn't uh haul the kind of distances I need to have these poles moved anyway.
What I'm gonna probably do is pick them up at a small pole yard down here in um uh Rochester and uh take them on over to where we think we're gonna get a home site.
Uh we're looking at some areas, I don't know just yet how it'll how it'll work out.
We're trying to get about fifty to eighty feet higher in elevation and get us a different kind of a perspective.
We've been here too long at the site we're at at the moment, and the house that we've got is uh they're really cool.
It's a Justice House, which is a uh form of a log home where they take the cedar logs and they slice them into basically um oh about a six by five chunk of wood and then they mill it down with a double tongue and groove top and bottom so it's all interlocking and so on.
But basically, it's a log home.
And this has all started me living here for 26 years.
I've had a lot of time to think about housing in general and the particulars of humanity and housing and how we ended up with the kind of housing that we've got, especially since my housing is annoying me all the time.
Uh part of the problem with these log homes, I mean they're great, don't get me wrong, but the problem is, especially of course in this environment where it's easy to find logs, and that's one of the ways that humans build, by the way, is whatever material is easily located.
You know, we're very efficient that way.
Uh early man did not decide to build igloos and uh because uh it was um neat and nifty and he wanted a you know uh natural air conditioning.
It was because he had a lot of ice.
Same thing with the people in the tropics.
They don't build the walls out of um uh mats and reeds and stuff uh because of the aesthetics.
I mean they like the aesthetics, but that's a secondary issue.
They've got the mats and the reeds and the fibers.
Uh so it's just kind of uh humans and their habitats are just kind of interesting how we approach all of this.
But um up here in the Pacific Northwest, of course, there's all kinds of logs.
Now, this um has led to all forms of log housing and law all low log housing of any form runs into serious problems after some some point.
And the house we're in is probably fifty fifty some odd years old at this point, and uh it's had numerous um issues over time uh that I've got to uh deal with, and the problem for us is A,
it's it's in no longer adequate to our needs, uh because our our uh lives are changing, and uh B, the um it's difficult to repair a small house uh basically to rehab it when you're living in it, uh because you know you'd have to haul everything out of the kitchen in order to remove the kitchen and replace it.
And in the meantime, there you go, you're trying to live with um, you know, your kitchen where you your living room used to be temporarily, and it gets to be really tedious.
Uh plus, as I say, this is uh isn't adequate for our needs anymore.
And it's uh gotten me thinking about uh housing in general.
And so I've got all these kind of uh woo-joes planned about the nature of housing and the you know the derivation and the uh evolution of it.
If you think about it, it's kind of strange.
Uh there's only really been uh recent time in which humans were not living in at least modern humans, uh were not living in some form of a cloth uh structure.
Uh Most of North America.
Hang on a second there, dog, hang on, what's up?
Sorry about that.
Older puppy got stuck underneath a chair.
And little girl dog had had a shower yesterday, and it takes away all of the mini pounds of dirt out of their fur, which gives them a little traction on the floor when they're lying on their sides.
And he had slid underneath there and couldn't get his back legs out to get up.
Anyway, though, um yeah, about the issue of housing.
And so, you know, our our uh all old log houses run into these problems.
The logs deteriorate.
There's just nothing you can do about it.
Our issue isn't uh with that so much as the way the guy did the initial construction was quite a little bit odd, and so it forces um huge amounts of extra labor uh in rehabbing the house, and after fifty years it really needs it, and we're not just not going to be able to do it while we're living here.
Fundamentally, that's what it comes down to is uh inability to both uh live here and fix the place up.
And then also uh very large house behind us, our needs have changed, and so we're looking to uh relocate, which you know, at age sixty retirement, all of that kind of stuff looming is not necessarily um unexpected.
Uh all of that crap aside, we run into the issue of um is not really a normal world.
And so um uh my thinking about housing is probably a little odd anyway, because I I consider you know what's the nature of housing, and I've lived in a lot as an army brat, I've lived in all kinds of housing all around the planet.
Um as a result of that, really, and uh some of my experiences, I decided that well, I would uh examine some of the issues that are involved in the housing and the mental states that it uh induces.
And I don't know that living in rectilinear structures is really optimal for humans.
Uh I actually have in the past spent many probably an accumulation of several years over um a lifetime, but many months at a stretch living in round structures like teepees.
Uh used to do this all the time in Alaska.
We'd go out in the summers and uh live in a teepee basically all summer.
Uh the teepees were even professionally constructed kind of things.
They were uh offered for rent by armies, uh the army um special services.
Uh these are the guys that would provide things like you know, aluminum rowboats, that sort of things.
Anyway, um so I wanted to examine the idea of living in a round structure.
Plus, we find ourselves in a situation where all of the kinds of houses that are being built are totally unsuited for uh basically two people and two dogs.
Um they're all huge boxy things, a lot of stairs.
Um lot of uh you know the mansion approach to um uh housing.
Uh I need land, so we're not into you know, I'm a messy sort of an inventor guy, and I need to you know have my boat projects spread out while I'm doing my boat project, and I've got windmills and the grow dome and all that kind of crap, so um condos, apartments, that sort of thing are out.
Uh but also in our particular uh world at the moment, with the uh the huge distortions caused by the less than one-tenth of one percent uh that control the banks and the uh currency death and all of the other issues going on.
It's uh it's an interesting time to think about our own personal housing needs within the grander scope of you know basically what the hell else is going on.
Solar system in um upheaval, the planets in an upheaval, all this kind of a thing.
Um plus there's issues with resources and costs, and uh it gets really um uh involved, uh much more so than boats, oddly enough.
Um you know, I always thought boats were the the really the pinnacle of engineering issues for providing habitation for humans because of the harsh environment of the ocean in which you had to engineer your habitat to survive.
However, um there's uh ramifications with engineering uh regular habitats on uh the planet, just regular houses, that I hadn't anticipated until I really got into it.
Not only the cost, but the long term nature of what you want to do with houses.
Think about it.
A lot of the reasons I'm I'm of the opinion at the moment, I haven't really built into it that deeply, but I'm of the opinion that a lot of the reasons that we do things with houses, uh, the way we do has to do with our ideas of inheritance that have been forced on us by uh the financial structure, which is a replica of the mindset of the power elite.
So think about it.
You know, all the huge investments that go into the into these houses were really with the idea back from the old uh feudal days of inheritance of being able to pass on landlocked, land-based wealth to uh progeny.
And for the vast majority of people, at least in the modern world, in modernity, um, who is ever going to get a position, be in a position to do just that?
That amount of people that are in a situation of being able to pass on a uh wealth in that fashion to the next generation is dwindling rapidly.
And plus uh uh uh previously uh the idea was that that next generation would return and live, or if they ever left, in the um in the uh old man's in the old um mansion in the old homestead.
And um that's just not occurring anymore, this multi-generational approach to living on the same piece of property uh from a an expanding uh multi-generational family.
Um that kind of a planet is gone.
Our uh social structure A doesn't support it anymore, but that's reflective of where we are and what we're doing and how mobile we are, and the individual uh desires and aspirations of each new generation and its differences from the previous generation, and the fact that we're living in a world that could be sliced generationally rather than uh familially or in a tribal fashion across generations.
So in that sense, uh the way we think about housing is probably needs to be rethunk a lot of the things that uh Butminster Fuller had gotten into in the twenties and thirties in some of his um inventions for housing.
He was really fascinated by housing and invented some really cool non-flammable bricks and stuff.
All of these are great ideas, but I think that we need to also reexamine our approach to housing in lieu or in light of the changing environment we've got around us, the the actual physical changes to the planet and the solar system, and those the idea that those changes may force on us uh certain levels of mobility, uh certain accommodations to things.
So in other words, I'm quite convinced that we're in an expansion of the planet mode that's going to have weird earthquake effects for a number of years.
Therefore, it doesn't make a lot of sense to bind your house housing so uh fiercely to the planet that when the planet shakes, the house either has to um uh whip back and forth violently, shattering everything inside, or uh disengage itself from the its moorings.
Um it makes sense to accommodate things in a different way.
So here we are, we're thinking about housing, we've spent a year plus looking at houses all over the county, uh all over multiple counties in the in the state here.
We don't want to leave the Puget Sound area for a lot of different reasons.
And um so we're stuck with the local uh environment, the local environment is such that they're keeping about 70 uh percent of the houses off the market one way or another in order to try and force inflation into the remaining 30% of the housing that is in fact on the market.
But that 30% has about a core of it, uh maybe half that simply isn't selling.
So there's really a very for a lot of different reasons.
So there's a very small amount of available housing, and then even then we find ourselves here, Kathy and I, in a situation of where most houses wouldn't suit us because of our um uh physical infirmities or because of the um nature of how they build these things.
You know, what what do I need five bedrooms for where they're little tiny chunky bedrooms?
It just does not work.
Um we need different things for the property than most people in an ordinary market.
Now in an extraordinary market that makes it even harder on us.
We we're just not able to accommodate the you know what few things are available because that few things are intended to go towards the 99% uh perceived needs is uh dictated by the building market.
Again, and I think the building market's way out of whack anyway.
Um so uh here we go we find ourselves in a situation then then by the way hey on top of all of that we don't have the kind of money it takes to buy um uh houses and uh in uh uh finished you know ready to move in kind of state and being self-employed uh there's no not a chance in hell that we can get financed and then basically the powers that be in their banking structure don't they don't like us anyway.
So it gets to be rather interesting.
Um and it has forced certain accommodations on us.
Now I had wanted to go towards something atypical anyway.
Uh Kathy and I had looked at actually a number of domes.
I'd looked at a big cement um uh dome out here uh above ground um it was interesting it it uh had all kinds of issues because of the way they made it I like cement in um in moderation for uh small amounts of things I actually trained as a as a brick mason um in a um uh there was this uh trade school back east and I uh you you had to take two sets of courses uh so you always had a fallback.
They were really smart about that.
I mean this was a trade school that had put some real thought into it.
And so my fallback was to be a brick mason because I figured I could go anywhere on the planet and uh as long as I knew my fatty mortar and and could get in there and um make that fatty mortar squish and produce the right noise I would be you know able to be employed.
And it that turned out to be true.
No matter where I went, I could always get a job temporarily working as a hod carrier or a brick mason or, you know, some level within the trades.
There wasn't that much opportunity for it up here.
You know, smart of me to train in Virginia for brickwork when brickwork really wasn't working up here and I knew I was moving back.
But in any event, so I like cement at some levels, but I appreciate its usefulness, but I also appreciate its cost.
It's hugely expensive to produce cement as a resource on the planet in the sense of you've got to burn stone for it.
It takes vast quantities of energy for this.
It's heavy stuff to pack around.
It uses huge amounts of water through the process.
So every gallon of water, I think, that is actually put into the Portland cement or concrete mixture that goes into your foundation, I think there's actually close to 140 gallons that are used in the intervening process, not including the creation of the basic chemicals.
So 140 gallons, you know, to continually wash the equipment, all of that kind of crap, right?
So it's very resource intensive.
uh even in the 20s and 30s but Mr. Fuller acknowledged this and he was trying to reduce some of that with his special fireproof brick that was earthquake resistant and all of this sort of thing.
Now I've gone the next stage and really examined the whole point of brick fire is really one of the issues the nature of housing is an issue as to why we build these huge structures and invest such huge giant quantities of labor in merely getting ourselves out of the weather um there's all kinds of mindset issues,
emotional issues tied to uh property and place and all of that, but a lot of that goes to the inheritance things that were foisted on us from the nature of the elites in the western version of northern hemisphere social orders.
If you look at the largest empire that ever existed on the planet, this was the largest land empire, land-based empire.
The last of the longest, this was the Mongol Empire.
And it was larger by far than anything that British were ever able to accomplish anybody.
I mean, Tamo Chin, who became known as Genghis Khan, led to the formation of what we think of as modern China in a roundabout way.
way, he had the largest land based empire, and this empire was uh created by and sustained by people that for all of their uh multiple hundred generations live in cloth houses, round houses, yurts.
It was such an ingrained part of their nature that uh they recognized, and if you go and read in the secret history of the Mongols, uh this particular book, uh you'll read um about how Tama Jun Genghis Khan recognized the nature of the mindset of people when they're living in a round house is far different from that when they become institutionalized,
so to speak, and live in rectilinear structures, and so forbade the Mongols from uh basically relocating to permanent square based houses, and made the whole empire a uh permanently based uh flexible, floating, soft, um, strong uh uh light empire, uh because they were based on these uh everything was cloth and fiber.
And they and it had a lot of it had to do with their thinking on uh resource allocation, and where should man, a man, put the resources of his life.
Uh if you looked at it one way, if you were to put all of the resources in your life that you put into your house, all of the work uh that percentage that goes to pay for the house, that percentage of your actual energy of your time, if you do if you just said nothing about money and just looked at it as time,
you know, mowing the fucking lawn to represent a weird savanna from Africa because of the uh ingrained uh peer pressure patterns that say that this is the way it should be, uh, to the weird uh combination of um materials, the energy you put into even surviving frequently in some of the new houses with all the weird materials that are assaulting you.
If you look at all of that portion of your life that's involved in these structures, uh at the moment, uh within Western society in North America, and to a great extent in some uh areas of Europe and even in Russia, you'll find that you're spending a vast majority of your life to deal with your house, and then your body's gonna die.
And it's like, okay, so you're gonna live uh say you live 50 years, and you gotta dink around with housing for 30 out of those fifty.
Uh and it's like, well, now that was a good investment of my time while I was here on this planet, wasn't it?
Anyway, so uh not to take up all of your time on my weird thoughts on on housing, but I've gone into this very deeply over the past few years, and it's been concentrated especially this last year, actually very deeply over the past few decades.
Uh especially because my association with Buckminster Fuller and his approach to housing and the impact of housing on humans and all of it.
Housing is very key, but I think that we're you know, we're trying to replicate the pyramids and uh in the mortuary uh tummery of Egypt, and we ought to be going back, like I think, to the Mongols.
You know, they did really well with this uh with their flexible houses.
Plus, I have a lot of really solid reasons for thinking that over the next few years, decades actually probably, uh the ability to flex on the ground relative to earthquakes in this environment's gonna be really good.
Uh we've had numerous problems with the structure I'm in here because of these damn slow earthquakes that are uh happening at these creepy levels where you never really feel the earthquake takes five, six months to happen, but it's a 7-0 in terms of its final release level, and we've got foundations cracking all over the place, cement is cracked in drive not our driveway, we don't have one, uh don't have cement driveway.
Um the runoff issue uh for me.
But in any event, uh the foundation on the house here, the guy put tons of money into the cement.
And that's another thing.
If you look at the structure of houses, you can spend up to forty well, average forty plus percent of the money you put in.
So forty cents out of every dollar you put into your house goes into the into the cement, into the ground that you you never never really uh uh use, it never has much value, and it's just this huge amount of weight that uh is there as sort of like the keel for your house on the ground, and it need not be that way.
So uh my approach is going to be entirely different here.
I'm going to um go back to something truly ancient, which is the pole structure.
When we went to uh Germany in uh sixties, uh We rented this place for a while, and it was just a regular house as far as I knew.
I was just a kid.
And actually, as we were leaving, we discovered that the thing had a foundation of poles that were 400 years old that have been sunk in a marsh that was no longer a marsh that was in the middle of this little town.
But many of the houses around there basically still had poles for a foundation, and the poles had never really rotted.
I'm sure there had been some level of degradation in them, but there was no sign of any kind of structural support.
Nothing was sagging.
You know, the house was quite sound and it was a brick structure that was built on a It was a plastered brick structure, and the plaster must have been geez, um two inches thick on the inside.
I don't know how thick the stucco-e stuff was on the outside.
So really a heavy, heavy building.
And we were in the fourth floor, and this thing was on poles.
So poles uh work quite well and have for centuries.
But there's also they also offer a lot of advantages up here.
First in cost, because the uh cost on a pole foundation versus a cement foundation for the same square footage is like staggeringly uh huge in terms of the difference.
The difference can be from a dollar a running foot for your foundation uh for poles or less, depending on the kind of structure you're putting up.
Uh uh and then the the level on cement, the cheapest I could get away with in some of these designs was thirty and forty dollars a running foot.
Uh so um the difference in cost is on an order of one to forty.
And the poles last longer, they have less impact on the ground, there's they take less time to screw around with.
Uh they're uh much more accommodating in terms of earthquakes.
Uh the whole uh house structure will f will remain rigid, my my platform design, and yet it will be able to uh flex and the poles will be able to flex within the structure without the structure itself flexing.
Uh just a matter of design issues.
And bear in mind it's not uh earthquakes that kill people as a rule, it's uh bad engineering.
And so I wanted to avoid as much bad engineering as possible.
Now I've gotten some questions about won't it be cold up there?
And it's like, yes, if you it would be definitely be cold and uh platform if you allow the uh platform to be a uninsulated and um be unsealed against the weather.
I have um uh really a very elaborate design for the uh support for the yurts on the platform, and the platform area underneath the yurts is gonna be um tongue and groove two inch um uh uh subflooring, so it'll be quite solid, and there won't be any air filtrate infiltration when I'm done.
Plus, I'm going to have um about a foot of uh poured-in insulation for a very uh thick uh uh sealed area that's also gonna have uh tubing in it for running hot water through.
So we'll have uh or actually for running water through.
Going to use it to the set up a valve and run hot water through the tubing to heat the floors in the winter as one of our three or four heating sources.
I like redundancy.
I like being uh anti-fragile and or I like being robust to uh various different uh problems.
And so we'll be able to heat the floors in winter, but we'll also be able to cool the yurts in the summer by simply redirecting and running cold water through the floors, usually at night, uh, to take any of the heat out during the that's accumulated during the day.
Uh so it'll keep the place nice and cool and it'll act as a form of um air conditioning.
Uh the same kind of effect you get with um uh unair conditioned uh Dobie kind of houses where basically the whole point of the in the in the southwest where it's very hot, uh the whole point of the house is to open it up at night, allow the flooring to cool off,
and then uh close it up just before you get into the day, then over the course of the day as you go in and out and open the house and so on, uh the floor remains uh source of a cool sink, it's called, and uh gains the heat slowly during the day, and then you just shed that heat at night.
Uh they use many different mechanisms there in the southwest though, for instance, I know of um uh some designs that where the floors are basically tight into uh uh areas of the grounds that are at a constant temperature that's usually lower than the floor anyway,
so it'd be uh you know, tying into the ground where it was like uh 55 degrees or sixty or something through uh sort of basically uh pillars, but um the approach is the same as uh uh geoengineering for uh thermal tech, uh just sort of the reverse heat pumps.
And so I'm gonna use a floor pump.
Uh we're gonna have multiple different kinds of um heat sources.
Uh you'll find that if you have infrared or uh radiant heat, uh heating the air is far less of an issue, you just don't care.
I've actually been working now for a number of years in my boat shed, which is a fabric, it's basically a yurt, it's a rectilinear uh tent used to that you stick uh RVs, you know, these um uh not remote viewers, but um uh you know the the little uh the big trucks, the little buses you live in and drive around in those kind of RVs.
Um you'd stick those in there.
And so it's uh basically it's just a sort of a yurt, it's a it's a tent, and what we've done there to keep ourselves warm while working on the boat, is to um put in uh insulation that's the same uh foil barrier insulation that we're gonna have in the yurts, and uh it's been quite nice, and then we've had I've had radiant uh propane heat in there and no problem.
Middle of the storms in winter and stuff, the it doesn't the structure isn't really affected.
Uh in fact, you'd we'd be working away in there, and then after five or six hours and uh take a break for lunch or something and come out, and you're quite shocked to see how violent the nature of the stormy weather has been because you're totally oblivious to it uh within um uh the structure.
Uh it's it's really an interesting way to live in terms of the tent uh fabrics.
Uh it'll be very interesting for us to live it in as um uh yurts, and then um the idea was that we're gonna live in the yurts and spend a couple of years building all of these kind of things and then also uh see how we like living in the round, and if so, maybe build a um uh structure that is also round as a uh more permanent, but we'll just have to see as a more permanent housing solution.
But we'll have to see.
These yurts have a fifteen year uh guarantee on the fabrics, the fabrics are easily replaced and uh very cheaply relative to the structure of a house.
Think about replacing the skin of your house if you had to.
It's actually kind of a good idea to replace them every 15 years anyway, as fabric becomes aged and needs to be renewed.
Uh again, part of the issue with a lot of the houses is that the degradation on the in housing it can be quite rapid, especially with modern materials, and yet we don't have a housing recycling kind of an industry set up yet to where we have uh in a more mature idea of how to deal with the houses.
And then there's the whole point of uh how I'm gonna deal with the land because uh my age at age sixty, starting over here again.
I don't find that as being too much of a problem, but I want to think about uh this in a particular way.
I have no real reason to uh uh want to impose my lifestyle on any kind of progeny should I have had them.
Uh but I wouldn't want to impose my life on uh the property on the land, other than I, you know, I'll make changes uh as necessary for uh growing and uh my science experiments and this kind of a thing.
But uh I th I find it suiting uh or suitable uh to my way of thinking that the uh on our death the structure could be easily uh disassembled and then somebody else could use the land in an entirely different way, and they wouldn't be uh subjected to our view of things.
And also the um then of course there's the other issue of the yurts or portable houses.
They can be disassembled.
Not particularly easily.
Uh, you know, I mean, it's not like a traditional smaller yurt where you could take it apart in a day.
Um uh but I could disassemble it, uh put it on my trailer that I've been working on with my Zornee.
Uh it's got 400 cubic uh greater than 400 cubic feet of uh volume.
It's a 20 foot uh actually it's a twenty-six foot trailer with a twenty-foot bed.
Uh and it'll haul ten thousand pounds, so you know I could put the house on there and drive it somewhere else and reassemble it.
Now, of course, we're building out a basically a sort of fully modern house on the inside of these uh yurts in any event that will be less than temporary.
Let's just put it that way, because I don't know how long it'll take us to make uh further decisions on the housing, and so I'm planning on uh at least a five or six years uh that I want the structure to remain that way.
And so, you know, we'll put in a regular kitchen and all that kind of thing.
Um it'll just be you know two round houses connected in a barbell fashion by uh central hallway, uh sitting on a large uh stable deck with hopefully a view of something other than uh uh the neighbor's giant McMansion.
Anyway, uh so all of the thoughts on housing and and the poor knees, and now I'm gonna get up and uh actually I'm gonna go and set up my little Belican um uh trampoline and try and bounce out some of the stiffness of this while listening to Max Kaiser uh rant and rave about the evils of the whatever is annoying him today.
Uh I really like Max.
He's uh he's a great guy.
I think he's gonna end up being one of the heroes of the planet.
He's actually been able to change.
I I put it, I give him credit for it because of his presence and his um uh purely human response to things and he just doesn't take shit from people.
But he's actually been able to change the popular behavior in both Russia and China.
Uh in both cases, Russia specifically, uh, but in both cases, he was able to push certain cultural buttons because they do a heavy translation of uh Max Kaiser into uh dialects in Russia and in um dialects in China.
Um he's able to push the populations into buying gold and being really smart and savvy uh about what's going on with the Western financial system in a way that had never been able and never been offered to them before, let alone to the rest of us out here.
Now living in the horror of the Western financial system from the inside, being in the belly of the beast here, we see it in an entirely different fashion.
But the uh victims of it are really those individuals that live outside of it.
And you gotta give Max Kaiser credit for having uh aided humanity to be less of a victim to the assholes and the psychopaths.
So uh anyway, I'm gonna sit there and or jump up and down and uh listen to Max Kaiser while trying to get my knee in shape so I'm going out.
Got two more of these four by sixes I've got a or uh two by sixes I've got to drill in onto the trailer, and then that's it.
That'll be the last of that, and I can quickly sheathe the uh inside and get it ready for the polls.
Uh it's the whole process is is really fascinating.
I think I'm gonna put uh GoPro cameras on the trailer and from that point on even, and so we'll um uh have a video record of the whole process of building the structure and and uh all of it.
Ought to be quite fascinating.
Anyway, oh yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry.
The whole point of the WuJo here was to catch up on some of the things that are going on.
We actually are running a test now.
It's Sunday here the ninth, it's uh like 6.53 in the morning.
I suspect that by noon on Monday we'll know, but we're running a test that may retrieve actually short and long-term data for us.
Uh I had this uh process that we'd run across we used to have to do it uh when uh Igor and I worked for uh in another capacity for a common employer, and it's called IP tunneling.
And it's uh it's an interesting process.
They use it in forming virtual private networks, VPNs and other things.
And we've sort of um uh undone IP tunneling and re uh done it at a uh different level, sort of a uh instead of a push, we're doing a get uh on um IP tunneling, and so far we've had some level of success.
We'll know for sure if we can get it going through um like I say, probably about noon on Monday, uh we'll be able to see if we've gotten enough data and run some processes to do some validation on it.
But if so, then what we've been able to achieve is to sort of fight our way through the trench warfare that's going on in the internet at the uh router level and uh create little safe holes that allow us to go on out and get data.
Now necessarily, I mean of a necessity, the approach greatly restricts the amount of data we're gonna get.
So instead of getting a hundred if we were gonna do a standard run instead of getting a hundred million, maybe we'd only be able to get uh tenth of that.
I don't know.
That's one of the things we have to ascertain tomorrow is if successful, what is the penalty we're paying in terms of total overall volume?
And does that matter?
We don't know that either.
So basically what we're gonna do is to uh restart the process with the idea of uh with the IP tunneling as the feed in uh in the month of June here.
And so I'll be opening up um it won't be immediacy data, it'll be the old ALTA reports because we're gonna run the full uh processing uh regimen.
Uh uh now as a as a necessity, we lose the amount of data coming through on the IP tunneling, but also because we're losing the amount of data means we don't have to wait that long to go through the whole thing in a batch process, and we can do it probably on weekly reports.
Uh we're hoping to do audio because my poor fingers can't take all of the typing.
So that's sort of the plan at the moment.
And I'll open it up here if that's the case.
Um I'll have some kind of an announcement on the site uh over Tuesday or Wednesday, and uh we'll see if we can't start another um uh go with the Alta processes, maybe as early as this coming Friday.
If we've got a good set that comes in on Monday, we're gonna go through the whole process of um uh working it, and that should take three to four days, and so probably by Friday we'll we'll have a shot at an interpretation and see what we get.
Uh it's sort of exciting that way.
The IP tunneling is uh, you know, we both uh Igor and I have done it in the past for a long time.
It just never dawned on us to approach it this particular way.
We were noodling around some ideas and um he came up with the idea, well, you know, could we reverse it?
And indeed we could.
And we did.
So uh we the initial test was quite successful.
Now we just have to see if it's gonna be uh successful in a production vehicle.
By successful, I mean it it brought back data.
I don't have any idea, and the data actually contains short term and long term, but I don't have any idea if uh we're able to get enough to make up worth the trouble.
Um so our thinking is that what we'll do at the moment, though, is to have an abbreviated June run uh that would basically be the last two weeks of the month.
And um if that works out, then we'll go full bore for July and uh press on from there and see um uh see how things mature.
The uh uh we're gonna take a different approach to uh pricing and stuff on it.
Uh we'll see how it's gonna uh work out.
All of that, if we if it's gonna be successful, all that'll be announced in a in a web page.
And uh, like I say, we're gonna uh tentatively shoot for um uh Fridays uh in lieu of Thursday, simply because that's how we ended up with the cycle at this point.
It may shift over time, we just don't know.
Uh we'll see in a bit here.
Uh the immediacy data processing turned out to be uh very prescient in terms of a lot of the weather and that kind of stuff.
It'll be interesting to see if we can get some shorter term and longer term uh data to give us more of a context, and um uh we'll know by noon on Monday, and and if so, make some kind of announcement one way or another, probably Tuesday morning.
Anyway, um that's basically it.
I gotta get a try and get the paint out of my knee and and uh go see what the other dog wants.
Okay, guys.
Talk to you all later.
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