All Episodes
July 29, 2013 - Clif High
47:58
20130729 – Clif High Audio #39
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, it's three eleven PM.
Screw the way that works.
On uh july twenty ninth, two thousand thirteen.
I'll try and remove some of the uh background uh noise here.
Uh most of it's from fans, it's rather hot out.
And I'm gonna keep the dogs and myself cool in the house.
It's not really that difficult, by the way.
Uh I can usually maintain we have no active air conditioning here, but um I can usually maintain twelve a minimum of twelve degree difference uh in the ambient air temperature and um the interior of the house.
And uh maybe twenty-five or thirty or forty degrees in the uh direct sunlight and the different the delta between that and the uh interior temperature of the house.
Usually uh it's easily accomplished.
I mean uh grew up poor or didn't get air conditioning until uh let's see nine was the first time I'd ever encountered it, nineteen sixty-nine, uh ever having to live with it and uh hated the stuff.
It dried out my sinuses, it was just terrible.
Every time you left the the air conditioning house, it was like uh this is back in uh Virginia, uh right on the coast there, uh at um Newport News near Hampton Roads.
And uh, you know, in the middle of summer you'd leave the air conditioning house, and it's like walking into a sauna so I'd much prefer just to be, you know generally miserable but a but acclimatized as opposed to uh comfortable and then uh terribly miserable for hours every day.
Anyway, so I never got the air conditioning habit, but um it's kind of funny, uh starting off with air conditioning and temperatures and stuff.
It's not really that that warm now out in the direct sun.
Uh we've got um looks like uh ninety-two.
And uh in the uh shade outside it's eighty uh interior temperature here I've got at uh sixty-nine, so it's not a not it's rather pleasant.
Uh it'll change over the afternoon and it might rise as high as seventy-three or seventy-four inside the house.
But overnight uh what I do is to vent out all of the heat.
The uh house that we're in at the moment has a lot of cement in it, so I am uh cool that off at night by having all the skylights and all the windows and stuff open, and then we uh sort of seal and keep the the cool in the morning, and then as the day moves on, um you sort of uh pump the coolness around with fans, and it's uh as I say, very pleasant, and it doesn't have anywhere near the cost of uh running air conditioning.
Uh both in terms of health and terms of you know its impact on sinuses and um uh that sort of thing, but also the cost and energy.
Now uh actually the whole point of the Wujo was to get into the issue of gray market.
And we're going around about a funny way, but it is connected because I went out today and involved myself in the gray market here in the um in uh western Washington.
Shh, we don't want to tell anybody sh.
But um I bought a uh used uh non radioactive because I checked.
I was an ass and I forgot to take my uh double A batteries down with me for my um rad meter and had to borrow some, but um nonetheless checked out the the tractor.
I bought a used uh non-radioactive tractor.
Uh Japanese one, uh old one, a Hinomoto.
Um it's a it's a strange thing.
Uh at the end of World War uh two, after uh actually, you know, physically incinerating a huge number of Japanese with all of our weapons, uh the United States uh was the uh richest middle class on the planet.
Our elites were extremely rich, but the percentage of the elite to the percentage of the middle class, even though that ratio was um uh not nearly as extreme as it is now, uh it was extreme enough, but even then the the difference in um uh potential for the middle class as a whole in terms of the amount of money that it controlled versus the amount of money that the elites controlled, it was a pretty even match.
I mean, you know, if the middle class uh decided to shift a particular way, the elites had to go along, because that's where really all the money was.
And then what happened uh in this country, basically uh at the end of World War II was the baby boom, and the uh elites had a uh an agenda, they took over the school system, grabbed hold of the baby boom, and shifted everything.
And so now we have a situation where the middle class in in America is no longer the richest middle class on the planet.
We're twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth on the planet at the moment in terms of uh aggregate wealth held by our middle class and it's shrinking and it is shrinking at a hugely alarming rate if you start looking at it.
It's not a situation of next year we'll be twenty-eighth because next year we might be thirty-ninth.
I mean we're falling that rapidly and uh uh we have evidence of this everywhere if you care to look if uh you're watching TV you're obviously not listening to the kind of stuff I'm speaking of or m or reading my reports or listening to my bullshit sessions here.
And so uh you if you were a person who watched TV you would be of the mindset that you know green shoots of recovery are everywhere.
And what's that song?
Oh yes happy days are here again and we have nothing to fear but fear itself all these old retreads.
In any event though our twenty seventh richest middle class on the planet means that we're you know um a little above Poland you know not as bad as Greece because Greece is falling uh but their rate of descent has slowed.
Uh so they'll actually reach an equilibrium probably faster than we will and we have a lot further to fall.
But um I find myself in the same situation as many people in Greece and many people in Poland.
I need to get things accomplished I'm an old fart I wanted to get some mechanical assistance in this we've got big stuff to move.
I would like to be able to do it safely without having to rely on human power and the problem with relying on human power now is not that it's inadequate.
You put block and tackle and all this kind of stuff together and I've got tons of that rigging gear and climbing gear and uh all this sort of thing.
And it's very safe and I do this all the time for myself and I'm heaving myself up on top of the roof here it's like thirty five, forty feet off the ground.
I've got a safety harness on, I do my own rigging, I buy my my um uh rigging gear from uh arboreal supply companies and you know 'cause I used to do tree work.
Um and uh do and I used to do rock climbing and stuff so I'm very safe up there.
Ooh and also now the little um the shoes, the um uh the toe shoes that I've got here from Vibram, uh they're really great for giving you the feel and it and Kathy sees me running around in them and says oh you're you know you look really funny but I wonder if roofers use those.
We found out that indeed roofers do use these because of the textural feel it gives you uh and the safety edge that that gives you up in high high um uh altitude.
Any event though so so I'm doing all of this, I do the roping and that kind of thing.
But it is inadequate when it comes to moving uh large and bulky objects.
It's the bulk that's the issue.
Well sorry about the uh interruption that was really cool though.
Uh it lasted uh geez at least a half an hour I think.
That was for uh Maurice from uh East Texas.
He gave me some really cool ideas on uh what may be um uh causing Kathy such distress uh the uh local um uh quacking community is quacking and uh uh that's about all we've had no real luck with that but uh Maurice hey now there's one uh sharp Texan uh great accent too uh yeah thanks Morris I'm gonna talk to her in a bit.
Anyway um where was I Oh grey markets that's right anyway so very very very long story.
I don't know how far we are into this.
Maybe, what, oh, eight minutes or so.
Okay.
But anyway, I went out into the gray market to buy a tractor.
And because we're 27th of the richest middle class now, we're in the same level as people in Poland.
And so I contacted some Polish farmers and also some guys in Greece.
And they directed me to some other guys.
And I saw some videos and stuff.
And I decided on a brand, a gray market tractor that's...
that is imported here and it's uh Hinamoto.
Uh these are are uh very inexpensive uh hard heavy uh rugged machines um with some exceptions they're they're they're uh uh very good for uh the road work and so on that I'm gonna be doing although they were originally a um agricultural tractor and you can find some uh of those particular years that they were made where they used a lot of aluminum and so they wouldn't be suitable for having a front end loader and that kind of thing.
But then they uh sort of stopped it and and went back to using steel again.
Uh I checked mine for radioactivity and never can be sure it was a mildly radioactive, um uh maybe two or three clicks above background um uh in the oil pan area, which is to be expected because when you burn diesel or any fuel for that matter, uh you create very minute amounts of radioactive waste.
And so and all oil to some extent is uh slightly more radioactive than uh the background anyway.
Uh uh so that was very interesting there.
But the gray market is um uh very interesting itself in terms of its um impact on local economies and what's going on, and uh the sort of stealth uh makers community that's that has to be um uh very stealthy these days.
It's almost uh an act of resistance anymore to the new world order to go on out and actually create something and do something.
Uh for instance, there was an article recently in the Seattle PI that said that four out of five uh adult Americans are uh out of work or uh uh in some way receiving support from the government, which basically means you're in uh government way you're a government slave in some form, uh but but a government employee in another form if you're getting food stamps, etc.
Uh, or any other form of assistance from government.
Uh but also the staggering part of that is that the one person out of five that does have a job, if we were to like further subdivide that, the majority of that fellow works for government as well.
All the new jobs are being created directly by government one way or another, and those jobs that uh are quote primary jobs, uh that um uh if the government actually went away, many of these primary jobs would also go away because they're not really primary jobs, they've just been relabeled uh as primary jobs.
The primary job used to be working at U.S. steel, making steel for anybody who wanted to buy it.
Uh these days you could have a primary job in the sense that um uh you um uh generate uh enough income that you have or that you have disposable income and you uh your disposable income when you spend it creates a secondary layer of employment around you in the sense that you know you buy gasoline and so they have uh sort of gasoline guys can um uh hire employees and so on, and you spend money at Walmart or wherever, and so they can hire employees and so on.
So you're a primary generator and they're a secondary in the sense that they're retail and they serve primary.
Uh but uh these days a primary uh category includes things like a subcurrent contractor to government.
And so it turns out the vast majority of new primary uh dollar growth in the um in America since uh 1996 has relied on an increasingly large segment of government until we arrive at the state now where five eighths of all new primary jobs are one hundred percent government dependent.
That if government stopped spending in certain way areas, uh five out of eight primary jobs would simply go away.
So if government didn't hire subcontractors, vast areas of the East Coast would suddenly be unemployed, as would all of the people that used to sell to all of those government subcontractors.
And and none of these government subcontractors are really a primary job because their wealth depends, quote, on the taxpayer.
Well, it used to.
Now it turns out, of course, that the uh all of the taxpayers together are useless to the government because the government per se, or the government as as an entity, is only receiving about eighteen percent of what it spends in all the taxes it collects from all of us.
I don't even know why it bothers anymore.
Uh it's created all of the money that it wants through uh debt and through uh enslavement, basically, uh by promising um to work all of its uh American citizens to death in order to pay back the debt sometime in the future, it has been allowed to borrow.
And then it's also uh been allowed to borrow and create money by way of threat, which government is nothing but force at all levels.
And uh this this threat is, you know, if you don't uh uh sell oil and petrol dollars or whatever, we're just gonna come and bomb the hell out of you.
But then there's also now this new uh section emerging in the background, which is the uh also part of the primary jobs in terms of the categorization By the uh Bureau of Labor and uh or lies and statistics.
Um that includes the uh you know uh space alien uh support jobs, uh all the primary jobs that they're all government, we think.
Uh we think they would go away if government went away.
We're not really sure about that.
So I saw we can call this um, you know uh fuzzy primary jobs, uh because we're not sure they may be primary jobs.
Once government goes away, we'll see.
But um, you know, it's all the subcontractors in the vast desert regions that support the little triangle floaty things and all those secret space activities that we've got going, as well as the uh United States um uh Kansas Navy.
Um another euphemism for our secret space program.
In any event, the um uh it's just very interesting on the gray market, and is it very pleasant.
I enjoyed the whole experience.
It was fun.
I got to walk around and uh play with tractors and kick tires and see all kinds of weird equipment that they're importing.
And it's uh interesting that we have to import that we can't manufacture, but at the same time, here's the whole thing.
This guy was a de facto manufacturer, he's got like and a de facto employer.
And he's got he's he's got a bunch of buddies that help him out, so nobody's actually working for anybody else, and they're all in it together in sort of a pirate share thing, although he handles all of the taxes and they're on his land, um and he does the import duties, and he actually went to Japan and negotiated contracts and all of this.
Um but um they're actually having to build things like uh backhoes and uh front end loaders and um uh all kinds of implements to fit these tractors because a lot of them are were strictly agricultural and are now being used for as I intend to, for uh what's called land taming around here, where you have to push some rocks and make a road or you know, move dead trees and that kind of thing to clear a site for a house.
And also I need the backhoe part because I want to do these air um or ground source air heaters, uh air heating cooling systems, uh both for the house I'm in, because it'll add value with very little cost.
Um I suspect I'll outside of the cost of the the capital cost of the tractor, uh the actual cost of the material is is uh the time it takes to dig a hole and lay um uh big plastic pipe and uh rig the and it'll put rock on it.
And I know what my cost on the rock is gonna be for the entire one hundred foot run, I'll have a uh just about three hundred dollars, it's two hundred and ninety-nine dollars in um uh drive big heavy duty uh uh uh crushed field rock here uh that packs really well.
Uh called driveway rock.
Uh anyway, and then I've got to buy a couple of large um uh those big green things that they stick around the septic tank so that I can use those as plenum.
And then uh just get the tractor out there and dig a trench and then push dirt back over it when we're all done, and we'll have achieved our um our our ground source uh air heating and cooling system uh for probably you know under five hundred dollars, I'm quite sure.
And um with all the fiddly bits and everything, and then uh the house basically has eighty percent of its heating and maybe ninety percent or greater of a really effective cooling system installed.
I've got a thermometer out there now and my current ground temperature down uh six feet is twenty-nine degrees cooler than my current air temperature.
Not that I'm particularly uh suffering at seventy-three degrees in here now because I've shut some of the fans down uh in order to do the Wujo.
Uh but yeah, it's 29 degrees um uh cooler.
So and that's that's an exposed ground that's been uh opened up and the hole isn't even really closed up much, so I'm sure that that's affecting it.
So it'll be very effective for cooling.
Probably uh could even chill if I wanted.
I doubt that though.
Anyway, anyway, so um here I am in the gray market, and I'm dealing with uh Charles and his buddies, uh so that uh basically so that my vegetable kale here and myself can move the boat around safely.
It's a big boat, it's uh thirty-two feet long.
It doesn't weigh that much, but you know, weighs more than either of us or both of us together, and so in shifting it, even though we would be using um block and tackle and we'd be moving slowly, any miss misstep, it can get out of control and pull us along with it if we aren't uh careful.
And the problem is that as I was long way of getting around to it, the problem is that unless you're really an old fart and you've worked in the woods, you don't have experience with ropes.
You don't know how to effectively deal with the tensions, tie the knots, uh know when you've um uh got a twist in the line that's gonna buckle your um uh rigging hardware by counter twisting against the load, uh these kind of things.
And so it became it can become really dangerous.
And as I say, the it's probably a thousand plus pounds of uh the main vodka hull here that we're gonna have to get onto the trailer and this kind of thing.
And so that's my excuse for involving myself in the in the gray market at this point.
Now I'm also a lazy ass and I've got these yurts I've got to go down to Oregon and pick up, which is uh another thing I want to talk about in a second.
But um I've got to go down and pick up the yurts and uh truck 'em back up here and they're gonna be crated.
And so what I'm gonna do is to stick a couple of uh these bolt on um uh add on parts to the front end loader, and I'll be able to turn my uh tractor into a forklift and be able to lift them off the trailer uh for quick turnaround and to uh be able to effectively stack them, which is a real problem if uh if we were trying to do this manually, which was the other option that we would have had.
I could have hired uh some more vegetable labor temporarily.
Uh Cale could have gotten some of his buddies, and we could have uh all of us gone out there and sweated for a day and disassembled these things on the semi truck, taking them out of the crates, move the crates, and then uh put the things back into the crates and resealed them, because they have to sit there for a while.
But uh we couldn't have stacked them because we're talking about weights that we couldn't have lifted without setting up tripods and all this other kind of stuff.
And it becomes trivial if you've got a little tractor with forks on it, you just lift it up, it's a forklift, it's it's done.
Uh I've got diesel lying around, so it was stupid not to do that, not to take that approach.
And in doing so, I was able to educate myself about the tractor market, and I like diesel engines, I always had them and worked on them.
Uh the three cylinders are just great uh getting things that are the tractor I've got here's got thirteen hundred hours on the engine.
Uh nothing.
That's trivial, it's hardly even broken in.
Uh so it's uh it's a good machine and non-radioactive.
I really like that.
My brother in law and I were joking about um uh last night about uh yeah, you don't need them glowing the dark nads, even though it might help uh late at the late at night getting up to go pee they still have a have a problem.
But in any event, so um yeah, so the uh the trip down to Hokan was great.
I went past Satsup, which is an interesting place because there are these two giant nuclear cooling towers there with their lights flashing, and they look really neat, and there's nothing coming out of them ever because there's no nuke plant there because they were um because everybody was really stupid.
I mean in the 70s around here, the whole planet was really dumb.
I I sat here, I saw it happen, and I wondered why everybody was so stupid.
The universe sometimes slaps you upside the head with its intentions ahead of time.
And so it created an organization expressly to manage and create nuclear power plants here in Washington State.
And what did it arrange to name it?
It named it hang on a second, there goes the truck.
It named it whoops.
So now let me say, uh anybody who's a bond holder and is foolish enough to stick their money into whoops uh deserves to have their butt whoops.
But uh, you know, and that's what happened.
Everybody went whoops, and uh nothing happened.
Uh the bond people lost their money, unlike the current holders of bonds these days who are protected by law, and any time a bondholder anywhere on the planet is uh threatened with um potentially losing money, they just make the Irish give them more.
Um that's just the way it's gonna be, I guess.
And um the uh but the bondholders then in the 70s went bust.
A lot of people lost a lot of money and they complained ferociously, and it was like, well, people you invested in whoops.
What do you expect?
There's a bunch of Eastern Washington farmers who were given the task of managing a multi-trillion uh well would have been it was multi-billion at the time, I'm sure, but it would have become multi-trillion a dollar operation with nuke plants everywhere sprouting up in Washington State like mushrooms, and nobody here wanted them.
Um at least none of the people that were uh real people.
I mean, uh it was funny, uh there were a lot of people that worked on whoops and sats up, a lot of people in Olympia, it was a big job boom.
Uh we all hated the idea of a nuke plant that close.
Uh these were not well designed.
Uh it was just a disaster waiting to happen, and fortunately for us, the disaster happened before there were any nuke plants built, as far as they got were the big uh cooling towers, which are really cool.
You're just shooting down uh state route um uh I think uh yeah, you're on State Route eight.
And uh or East 8 they call it, and um uh scooting on by those, and they're you know they got their lights flashing and they just stand out there, these just magnificent monuments to whoops you know, it's kinda like uh if we could have the Titanic around, it would convince everybody to that was in everybody in the shipbuilding business should go and look at it.
That kind of thing.
Here everybody who's ever thinking about nuclear power plants should go and look at whoops and uh consider, you know, whoops.
And anyway, though, um I've always thought that they should just seal up the bottom of these things and um raise shrimp in them.
Uh the reason being that it's uh almost impossible to raise um uh high quality cold water uh shrimp in an aquaculture situation without the depth of the water.
Those are some mighty big tall fuckers.
They'd hold a lot of water, and it'd be very effective.
Or you can, you know, have people take diving classes in them and that kind of thing.
Uh plus there were a lot of guys who wanted to go and climb the bastards.
But they um uh myself among them, it would have been really cool.
Uh because of the shape of them, they're sort of like uh uh vaguely hourglass shape.
So if you could have ever gotten a lineup on the uh top, you'd have to climb them from the inside.
But if you ever gotten a lineup on the top, you would have been able to repel down that entire length with just a single who until you were down to that bottom edge.
And then kick your feet off and you're good.
Then you drop that last thirty or forty feet.
Uh anyway, though, um so uh drove past SATS up, went on out and talked to uh these guys out in the gray market land and saw lots of tractors, had a good time, picked up this old Hinamoto.
Uh it doesn't have much in the way of hours on it, it's uh twenty years old though.
Uh the seats torn to hell, and I'm gonna have to rebuild parts of it, but it doesn't leak, and I can use it to get the yurts off, and we can use it to move things around here and alter um uh the landscape now that I have to.
But some interesting things about all of that too was the um uh the area down there at Hoqueam Aberdeen, I'll get back to the yurts in a second.
The uh Hockwim and Aberdeen uh area was not anywhere near as radioactive as it is up here in terms of the background.
So that was quite uh quite fascinating, and I drove up a little bit towards the Hump Tulips River and looked at some property up there.
Magnificent spread.
Magnificent, 133 acres.
Uh way beyond my needs.
Uh but just a beautiful um uh piece of property with a house and a couple of barns and stuff on it.
Uh in case anybody's interested, they wanted um I think three hundred and fifty thousand was their asking price.
Uh the reason I went on up there was the guest house on it is a uh one of these squared yurts, uh uh hard sided yurt, a mountain uh brand, I think they are out of Montana.
Um or maybe it's just Montana brand.
I don't know.
Anyway, they're uh they're a hard sided uh approach to yurts where they just sort of go along and they square the circle.
And you've got a permanent uh livable structure that's that's basically not a tent.
And that's what we've come come back to is discussion on the yurts.
I've got to go on down and talk to the guys at Pacific Yurt and uh uh put yurt number one into the trailer in the truck and scoot back up here.
But on the when I go down, I'm gonna take this thing that um uh this um prototype that I've invented, and uh we're gonna go ahead and proceed with this.
Uh my vegetable myself uh have made a mold, and uh we're using uh vacuum forming and some cool stuff.
Uh various new materials and some boat building techniques and so forth to build uh hard sides for our yurt.
Now these hard sides that I'm building are gonna be vacuumed on the radius.
And uh we're using radial math, and so uh the radius of the thirty foot yurt is fifteen.
Um so we're using uh fifteen sections that are six point uh two eight uh feet uh in length in the arc, uh covering twenty four degrees with uh uh uh drop off of a three degree uh total error around the whole circumference that's um uh uh covered by the internal slats that I'm gonna use to um uh connect them.
They're basically going to bolt together.
And so you'll uh one day after the yurt's up and we've uh done stuff and so on, then we've got all these panels because they make fifteen of them.
I've got the prototype and we're gonna actually crank out the first prototype and fire up the vacuumforming stuff on Tuesda tomorrow, geez.
Um Tuesday, uh yeah, on Tuesday, uh after I get back from some other chores, and uh so the vegetable number one Cale and I will uh use the vacuums and uh make big bags and have resin everywhere and all kinds of fun with window putty and and um uh great masses of plastic uh because it's not easy to vacuum bag something this size.
I've done uh I've done fairly large things before, uh larger than this, but usually not as bulky because we've got a big form under this in order to enforce the arc.
Uh but here's the upshot of it all.
Uh in Germany, let's take a departure and let's truck on over to Berlin where they have all these weird rules and stuff that they force feed some of which they force feed to uh the EU and Belgium.
And they have this concept of a passive house in Germany and they've set certain values for that passive house based on where that house might be located.
And so a passive house is defined by them as a structure that requires no form of external heating that it heats itself just by the activities and of the people inside and the appliances that they have running applying you know the washer dryer dishwasher that kind of thing.
And it doesn't really require any even in the extreme cold days doesn't even really require any external source of heat.
Now some passive houses are built with straw that's really good straw bale and this kind of thing.
Other passive houses are built with sip panels, structural infill panels that have styrene some use uh polystyrene with cement infill and there's all kinds of different approaches to it.
And what I'm doing is I've decided that well I've come back to this situation where Kathy likes the idea of living in the yurt but she doesn't want to live in a tent.
And it's like okay that's kind of self-contradictory but I sort of see the position and a lot of women are like that.
They like the round building but they don't want to live in a tent.
They want something a little bit more you know permanent more of a a real long house feel to it.
And so our approach here, my approach is to well we like the idea of the yurts we're going to set them up and live in them and so what I'm going to do is uh Cale and I are going to take this mold and produce thirty of these panels because I have two yurts, fifteen panels per yurt,
and we're gonna uh produce the required number of panels for the uh tops of the yurt for the roof slash ceiling and then we're gonna bolt these all together one day after stripping off all of the uh external cover from the Pacific yurts.
We'll still leave all of the internal frames.
We'll leave the walls.
I got the snow and wind package, which provides you with internal studs.
So we could even sheetrock if we wanted.
You can even sheetrock them when they're a tent.
But, of course, you have the tent component of it.
You'd have the soft sides.
Now, I'm a sailor.
I love fibers.
I love cloth.
I don't have a problem with living in a tent.
We used to live in teepees in Alaska for a great number of the year, a number of the months of the year.
uh, I've lived in in tents in California uh I kind of enjoy living in odd places but you know women well they've got these peculiarities you know they like things like bathrooms and things.
So anyway, and women don't like living in a tent.
And basically a yurt is a tent no matter how fancy.
And these are some pretty fancy damn tents.
So we're going to make these panels using this vacuum forming technique and stuff.
And what we've been able to do is using basically off-the-shelf material in a synergetic fashion here, I've been able to put together a hard side to the yurt that will allow me to be very flexible with the outside of it.
I can do anything I want in terms of it.
It can be painted.
I'm actually going to go to the trouble tomorrow of getting some exotic veneers for our prototype just to see how they'll look at this local wood place over here.
Just going to go buy a bunch of samples and slap them down and we'll just see.
No real pattern or anything.
See what serendipity yields.
But when I'm done, the sides of the yurt here, each of these panels, which will take us about 25 minutes maybe to lay up and then about another 20 minutes to mix the resin for them, because they're going to be resin and protected against the weather.
But when we're done, these things are going to be R122 by calculation.
maybe beyond that because of synergistic effect and we won't know until we test them.
But at R122 we're getting awful close to the German definition of a passive house for our area.
Now our US government for our area here in Western Washington with all the moisture and the humidity and all this kind of stuff all the building codes suggest R 30 for the roof but the actual requirements for most of the um structures are R19.
And so here we are and with a potential of um exceeding that by eight times with our hard sided panels.
And the beauty of this is that that we'll have the yurt set up we'll have uh you know kitchens, bathrooms, all that kind of stuff built inside them they'll have the soft sides on them, but to assemble the 15 panels each one of the panels will have approximately well it'll have a dozen um basically it'll have six stainless steel bolts and wing nuts that'll be required and a special kind of wing nut that'll be required to put it together to the panel next to it and then it'll have a a similar number along the arc of the um of the top,
and then it'll have a different method of adhering at the bottom.
But we'll bolt the things together in a day, and put the tops on and bolt them together.
Each of the panels will be very lightweight, the way we're manufacturing them, they're virtually fireproof.
Uh we've actually got a sample here that I've been able to put a torch to, a map torch, not just a propane torch, but a map torch that um uh with oxygen fed in.
We couldn't get the thing to burn.
We got it to scorch finally when uh when we were almost out of gas uh by really increasing the oxygen and getting it really damn close.
Uh but um because of we're using um uh stuff that alters the thrixotic and other properties of the resin, we can make this stuff um in uh basically impervious to temperature up to about three thousand degrees.
Uh I'm not going that far because the expense involved in taking it over it, but I can get it up to six hundred degrees with no problem at all, uh, extremely cheaply.
And so we're gonna do that.
So m the solid-sided yurt and the ceiling here would require something in excess of six hundred degrees before it would begin to show effects from the heat.
And it's going to be one uh uh insulated little uh toasty um round house because it'll have at least R 122 in it.
Uh so it's kind of a cool process, the the whole thing, uh the vacuforming and all of this, and uh at this stage I've I've also got another full-time job, which is teaching the vegetable how to do everything.
He doesn't really know, you know, he's a kid, he's never um never done vacuforming, you know, and uh never uh um uh done this sort of screwy stuff that we've got going on here.
Uh and I've also got to teach him to uh drive the tractor once I've figured it out, because of course all of the little buttons and everything are in Japanese and we don't have a English manual.
So it's uh I know where the key goes, I'm gonna turn it on, we're gonna start pushing buttons and see what happens.
Uh such a day.
I've been at it a long time.
Uh let's see, it's like four in the afternoon and I've been up since three, so and uh drove over a good section of the of those uh part of the state.
I was all a little tired, and uh I've still got to get the uh tractor off, figure out how to get it to back up.
So this'll be fun.
Anyway though, we're getting all set up to do the uh first of our videos too, which will be on the uh uh ground um air source uh or ground source air heating and cooling system.
And uh we'll get a video, I'm gonna uh uh get out there and videotape the whole process.
The plenums, everything is really easy, there's no moisture, guys.
It's like hey, you have a long uh horizontal run of pipe, but at the end of it there's an open T on each end, and the bottom part of the T, the one part of the T faces up, and you attach a pipe to that, uh the other parts of the T face down, and you don't attach anything down into it, it just goes down into gravel.
And so any moisture that accumulates just naturally wicks away in the uh packed gravel that you put under it.
So moisture is not a problem.
Uh even in very moist pa places where they've discovered these things, and the Romans build them as far north as in Germany.
So uh, you know, it's basically the same sort of terrain we have here.
Um very interesting, yeah, they just didn't have any moisture and they dig them up and the pipes are still dry and not moldy on the inside.
So kind of cool.
Uh anyway, but we're gonna do a video about how to do this.
It's uh really simple, uh very cost effective.
You can use all different kinds of pipes.
Some people are suggesting we can get pecs that's big enough.
Uh I don't know if you can get pecs large enough.
You there's certain constant there's certain math involved uh based on the cubic uh size of the house.
Uh you have to have a certain size pipes, so um or you know, a whole bunch of them, that kind of a thing.
But you can bring a number of them into a single plenum, so the that makes it very um uh easy as well.
They found them where they have plenums were in Turkey where it was very hot, the plenums were uh I think eighteen feet across basically six cu six cubits, and I think each cubit was three feet in that point,
and so eighteen feet in in diameter, and they were down nine feet uh uh below the surface of the soil, and so they had a really cool constant temperature, and then they were in a uh radiating out uh about a hundred feet, but there were more than a dozen of them in kind of like a half star pattern that all fell fed the same plenum.
And this time I there's a lot of people that suggest this was a cool down place as part of a bathhouse and stuff, but I think it may have been uh an attempt to do uh cold house or you know, food storage.
Uh the archaeology on that is uncertain, and I don't necessarily buy the quote expert's opinion on it, simply because the size of the plenum that was used for the volume of the of the uh structure that's implied by the foundation uh just doesn't make sense unless you're trying to get it really cold.
Uh so you know, and humans have certain tolerances.
Anyway, though, so uh I'll be wrapping this up fairly quick.
So, yeah, so the um we're gonna go down and introduce uh Pacific uh yurts to the idea of um uh vacuforming a hard sided uh um passive structures out of their uh existing yurts.
And then I've got a way for actually um building the structure uh for the yurt into the panels so that we can go that way as well.
But this would allow anybody that already purchased a yurt to make their structure permanent and put on one of these really cool waterproof houses, housings for it, uh hard sided, you could make it look anything you wanted, you know, it can be cedar sh uh you can nail them and nail to them and stuff.
I wouldn't recommend it, uh, but you could do a small amount of it.
Uh but they could be made with uh cedar, you can make them with exotic woods, you can make it so it can be painted, uh I mean like design it to be painted with a special uh surface to take paint really well.
Um that kind of thing.
So there it's very uh flexible in what can be done with it and uh very cool.
Uh there's other yurt companies that Pacific isn't interested.
I I'm not particularly interested in doing the manufacturing myself.
Once I discovered the process, I and you know, go through the prototyping and play with it all.
I usually get bored with it and want to go do something else.
And we've also now we're starting to work on well, as part of the tractor deal, I got a um uh post hole digger, but it's for twelve inches for dropping these big poles in for uh supporting the um uh the yurt platform.
Uh as you can see on our round square feet site, round squarefeet.com.
Um we've got some pictures there of the designs for the yurt uh for that platform.
But um and eventually I'll put all of our construction related stuff there anyway, uh even if I put some of it on half past human in the meantime.
Uh but any in any event I got this um uh post hole digger and we're gonna put in a bunch of when we relocate here and find some property, and I think I found it is just bloody expensive.
Uh but um we're gonna dig some holes and we're gonna put um uh passive um put up our solar panels that I've got, but I'm gonna put them on the on the poles instead of mounting them on the roof.
I don't want to mount them on a on a tent on a yurt.
Uh but I still want solar panels.
I mean uh you know we're still off grid.
So uh but what we're gonna do, I've got um a way of fixing the of solving some of the problems that are inbuilt in the um uh passive tracker business.
And so we're we're gonna stick some poles in the ground and put these um uh solar panels up there and then uh uh go to weld up some interesting little bits and pieces and fabricate some stuff, and we'll um be able to have a passive tracker that will automatically track the sun without having to be programmed or um uh electrically powered.
Uh so that's kind of cool.
It'll be basically a solar-powered uh passive solar tracker.
And it's a good design.
And once we've got those going, then we'll um we might go into manufacturing on there.
Depends.
You know, the manufacturing uh infrastructure support in the United States is crap, so it may not be worthwhile to manufacture, it may just be worthwhile to invent it.
Uh we'll see.
Anyway though, uh so uh tractor for an old man is gonna come in handy now, uh being able to lift up heavy things and uh shape the land and get ready to put in the platform for the yurts and all of that, and then the way the the plan is that it'll probably be January in the middle of the horrific winter that we're gonna get.
By the way, guys, it's gonna be a horrific winter, especially along the west coast.
Uh I'm talking, you know, stuff in the data that's still rolling in about how nasty the winter is going to be.
So I'm doing everything I can to um uh uh you know super insulate and get all my heat sources and everything super prepped, um uh you know, getting it laying in extra biodiesel.
I've just gone through and uh tuned up my uh generator and I've got my uh batteries all uh equalized and uh maximally packed with uh amp hours uh just because it's gonna settle in on us probably very unexpectedly.
Uh it's part of the oscillation due to the climate change, due to the shift in the um uh conical perspective that we've got as a planet behind the sun, and now here's another thing.
A lot of guys are suggesting, a lot of uh pundits are suggesting that, oh well, we're gonna we're in global warming, there's gonna be this, that, or the other kind of effect.
Is if they're not suggesting that there's going to be rapid oscillation and uh moving towards a sudden um and prolonged uh shift, then they've sort of got the wrong idea because what's actually going on is the earth is shifting away from the sun, but the earth is growing simultaneously, and that's sort of what's causing it to shift, along with the extra energy coming in from the sun as the sun realigns all of the planets that are behind it, all of its debris field, so to speak.
Um as that is ongoing, we will find that our days are going to alter in terms of our orbit.
And so we'll have a longer year.
Uh I'm still doing some calculations.
If if we're at 1.5 degrees, as I seem to think we are in terms of it the northern range of the solar of the sun rise and set, then that would imply that we're going to get about twelve um more days, like eleven point something more days uh in our year, and it will be at a larger part of the cone behind the sun.
Now, there are going to be effects from this, the sun will appear slightly smaller, and at the same time, however, because the sun is much more energetic, we may indeed receive and will indeed receive a lot more uh solar radiation.
In the process of shifting, the magnetosphere is going to go wonky for a while, that'll be very dangerous.
Uh the shift won't be like a pole shift or anything like that.
It's going to be imperceptible from our perspective, other than these symptoms that will show up.
In other words, we won't feel the planet grow beneath our feet unless you're very sensitive, and you won't feel the planet move in its orbit beneath your feet.
However, you'll notice that the sun will be ever so slightly smaller, you know, you'll think, hmm, it doesn't look quite as big as it used to when I was a kid.
And then you'll also notice that, you know, there's the days are a little bit wonky and the calendar's a little wonky.
Um not all pear-shaped, the way the Brits would say, but you know, uh sort of plum shaped, not quite apple.
And so uh it'll just be a little weird for us.
And then, you know, eventually everybody will recognize this, and there'll be some level of attempt to correct whatever's going on.
In terms of the calendar colo uh calendar count and so on, relative to you know, planting and this kind of a deal.
But for an unknown number of years, we're gonna be faced a very interesting transitional period that will affect things like food crops and all of this sort of thing.
And so as I was saying, the um sorry about that.
Um but as I was saying, so food crops will be affected, um uh oceans will be affected, the it's a matter of the penetration levels of the light, you know, blue versus red, uh frequencies, how deep they'll go, the heating impact, carbon dioxide absorption will be different, methane ex uh um exhalation from the planet will be different.
That's primarily from the volcanoes.
But there's gonna be a new factor pretty soon, and that is this crustal goo, the the actual separation of the planet itself, the growth of the crust.
Well, we'll shift some of them.
It'll you know we'll have like methane um landslides beneath the ocean where vast fields of them will will slide down into the new deeper abyss as these trenches and and cracks open up.
But um in doing so, some of it may be released.
Uh some of them may actually float up.
We just don't know what the impact's gonna be there.
It's probably uh unpredictable.
Um anyway, so there's all this sort of stuff going on, and it is gonna make sense to sort of prepare for these climatic impacts.
The one thing that we can really prepare for that makes sense to prepare for is ice age.
And the reason I say we're gonna have an ice age has to do with the annual cycles in or the not annual, sorry, the hundred thousand year, a hundred thousand annual cycles uh that are required in these ice age formation things, plus the hints that we've got right now that an ice age is indeed ongoing, and starting up with uh some seriousness.
Um but the thing about the ice age is this, it doesn't clamp down all of a sudden with snow and everybody's in a glacier.
It's actually oscillation, as was uh discussed uh repeatedly and in depth throughout the fifties by a lot of the science guys.
Uh Isaac Asimov and a lot of science writers postulated, well, how do you actually end up in an ice age?
And they went through it and had some really good thought experiments and worked it all out.
And one of the things you get is just what we're seeing now, which is the oscillation and the sharp edge that you'll sometimes find to the weather, where you're in spring one day and the next day is harsh summer, and then when summer ends, it's a very abrupt transition to a sudden winter storm with no real fall in there at all, and we'll lose fall and spring.
All of that kind of thing is actually sort of happening.
It can be expected to continue for some time as we uh the planet goes about this little shift and we end up in this new location.
Uh it will cause some level of dis disruption.
A number of points have been cited in our Alta report.
Uh it doesn't really matter.
Uh it'll all um come out in the end in the sense that we'll all live through it.
So um we're sort of preparing for the first of the hard edges for it that are going to hit us uh this year.
I suspect 2013 will be a uh particularly pivotal year for a number of reasons.
And one of the things that we'll see, if I'm right, uh we're gonna have a very harsh winter along the west coast this year, uh potentially lots of snow.
Uh if not snow because of the temperature, then vast quantities of rain and flooding uh beyond anything we've ever had to endure to this point.
And so uh we're now going to be faced with the amount of moisture coming down, uh, you know, uh whole month's worth coming down in in five hours, that sort of thing.
So it'll be very nasty for us, and I'm getting ready for that.
But it'll there we won't be alone in this.
North America is going to really suffer this year uh in ways we did not in last year's winter, uh excepting places like Canada, and then you know, of course, all of the disastrous tornadoes.
Now we're gonna have um uh ice um uh we had uh really nasty winter last year.
I mean, don't get me wrong, but um it's not comparable to some of the, you know, uh we set all kinds of records, but it wasn't as though we ended up with one of the uh perfect storm kind of uh winters where there was, you know, nine feet of snow everywhere uh along the east coast.
But we've got we're facing that kind of winter in 2013 and 14, and then something similar probably in 2015-16.
Uh we never get to get a hit here on the west coast this year, though.
And so, like I say, it's best to sort of prepare for it.
We're still running a lot of the data gathering stuff, and so I s I snoop in and have a look, and um the weather trends are still clocking towards a very exceptionally uh harsh, as uh the linguistics are defining it basically it's probably gonna be a harsh winter.
And uh hey, you know, uh grasshopper and ant kind of thing.
Now's uh the time grasshopper to think like an ant.
So anyway, guys, I gotta go out and see if I can figure out how to start the Hey Motor tractor and back the bugger up off the trailer uh and then put everything away.
And um I'll uh post this later.
Uh the Alta report is shipping.
If you have problems um uh let us know and I'll uh I'll get at it and fix it.
But uh we're out doing stuff, so you've got to give us a little patience.
We're not monitoring the the uh equipment all the time now.
Export Selection