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July 29, 2013 - Clif High
47:58
20130729 – Clif High Audio #39
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Time Text
Good afternoon, it's 3:11 p.m.
Screw you the way that works on July 29th, 2013.
I'll try and remove some of the background noise here.
Most of it's from fans.
It's rather hot out.
And I'm going to keep the dogs and myself cool in the house.
It's not really that difficult, by the way.
I can usually maintain, we have no active air conditioning here, but I can usually maintain a minimum of a 12-degree difference in the ambient air temperature and the interior of the house, and maybe 25 or 30 or 40 degrees in the direct sunlight and the different delta between that and the interior temperature of the house.
Usually it's easily accomplished.
I mean, I grew up poor, didn't get air conditioning until let's see, 69 was the first time I'd ever encountered it in 1969, ever having to live with it.
And hated the stuff.
It dried out my sinuses.
It was just terrible.
Every time you left the air conditioning house, it was like this is back in Virginia, right on the coast there, at Newport News near Hampton Roads.
And, you know, in the middle of summer, you'd leave the air-conditioned house.
It was like walking into a sauna.
So I'd much prefer just to be, you know, generally miserable but acclimatized as opposed to comfortable and then terribly miserable for hours every day.
Anyway, so I never got the air conditioning habit, but it's kind of funny, starting off with air conditioning and temperatures and stuff.
It's not really that warm now out in the direct sun.
We've got, looks like 92.
And in the shade outside, it's 80 interior temperature.
Here I've got it 69, so it's not, it's rather pleasant.
It'll change over the afternoon and it might rise as high as 73 or 74 inside the house.
But overnight, what I do is to vent out all of the heat.
The house that we're in at the moment has a lot of cement in it, so I cool that off at night by having all the skylights and all the windows and stuff open, and then we sort of seal and keep the cool in the morning.
And then as the day moves on, you sort of pump the coolness around with fans.
And it's, as I say, very pleasant, and it doesn't have anywhere near the cost of running air conditioning, both in terms of health, in terms of its impact on sinuses and that sort of thing, but also the cost and energy.
Now, 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 western Washington.
Shh, we don't want to tell anybody shh.
But I bought a used, non-radioactive, because I checked.
It was an ass, and I forgot to take my AA batteries down with me for my rad meter and had to borrow some, but nonetheless, checked out the tractor.
I bought a used non-radioactive tractor, a Japanese one, old one, a Hinomoto.
It's a strange thing.
At the end of World War II, after actually, you know, physically incinerating a huge number of Japanese with all of our weapons, the United States was the richest middle class on the planet.
Our elites were extremely rich, but the percentage of elite to the percentage of the middle class, even though that ratio was not nearly as extreme as it is now, it was extreme enough, but even then, the difference in 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 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 in this country basically at the end of World War II was the baby boom.
And the elites had 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 America is no longer the richest middle class on the planet.
We're 27th or 28th on the planet at the moment in terms of 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 28th because next year we might be 39th.
I mean, we're falling that rapidly.
And we have evidence of this everywhere, if you care to look.
If you're watching TV, you're obviously not listening to the kind of stuff I'm speaking of, or reading my reports or listening to my bullshit sessions here.
And so, 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 27th richest middle class on the planet means that we're, you know, a little above Poland.
You know, not as bad as Greece, because Greece is falling, but their rate of descent is slowed.
So they'll actually reach an equilibrium probably faster than we will.
And we have a lot further to fall.
But 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.
And rigging gear and climbing gear and 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 35, 40 feet off the ground.
I've got a safety harness on.
I do my own rigging.
I buy my rigging gear from arboreal supply companies because I used to do tree work.
And I used to do rock climbing and stuff.
So I'm very safe up there.
Oh, and also now the little shoes, the tow shoes that I've got here from Vibram, they're really great for giving you the feel.
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 and the safety edge that that gives you up in high altitude.
Any event, though, 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 large and bulky objects.
It's the bulk that's the issue.
Well, sorry about the interruption.
That was really cool, though.
It lasted, geez, at least a half an hour, I think.
That was for Maurice from East Texas.
He gave me some really cool ideas on what may be causing Kathy such distress.
The local quacking community is cracking, and that's about all.
We've had no real luck with that.
But Maurice, hey, now there's one sharp Texan.
Great accent, too.
Yeah, thanks, Maurice.
I'm going to talk to her in a bit.
Anyway, 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 of a gray market tractor that is imported here.
And it's Hinamoto.
These are very inexpensive, hard, heavy, rugged machines with some exceptions.
They're very good for the road work and so on that I'm going to be doing.
Although they were originally an agricultural tractor, and you can find some 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 sort of stopped it and went back to using steel again.
I checked mine for radioactivity.
You never can be sure.
It was mildly radioactive, maybe two or three clicks above background in the oil pan area, which is to be expected because when you burn diesel or any fuel for that matter, you create very minute amounts of radioactive waste.
And all oil to some extent is slightly more radioactive than the background anyway.
So that was very interesting there.
But the gray market is very interesting itself in terms of its impact on local economies and what's going on.
And Sort of stealth makers community that has to be very stealthy these days.
It's almost an act of resistance anymore to the new world order to go on out and actually create something and do something.
For instance, there was an article recently in the Seattle PI that said that four out of five adult Americans are out of work or in some way receiving support from the government, which basically means you're in a government way, you're a government slave in some form, but a government employee in another form, if you're getting food stamps, etc., or any other form of assistance from government.
But also, the staggering part of that is that the one person out of five that does have a job, if we were to 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 are, quote, primary jobs, that 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 as primary jobs.
The primary job used to be working at U.S. Steel, making steel for anybody who wanted to buy it.
These days, you could have a primary job in the sense that you generate enough income that you have disposable income and your disposable income when you spend it creates a secondary layer of employment around you in the sense that you buy gasoline and so they have sort of gasoline guys can 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.
But these days a primary category includes things like a subcurrent contractor to government.
And so it turns out the vast majority of new primary dollar growth in America since 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 100% government dependent.
That if government stopped spending in certain areas, 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 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 all of the taxpayers together are useless to the government because the government per se, or the government as an entity, is only receiving about 18% of what it spends in all the taxes it collects from all of us.
I don't even know why it bothers anymore.
It's created all of the money that it wants through debt and through enslavement, basically, by promising to work all of its 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 been allowed to borrow and create money by way of threat, which government is nothing but force at all levels.
And this threat is, you know, if you don't sell oil and petrol dollars or whatever, we're just going to come and bomb the hell out of you.
But then there's also now this new section emerging in the background, which is also part of the primary jobs in terms of the categorization by the Bureau of Labor or lies and statistics.
And that includes the space alien support jobs, all the primary jobs that they're all government, we think.
We think they would go away if government went away.
We're not really sure about that.
So we can call this fuzzy primary jobs because we're not sure they may be primary jobs.
Once government goes away, we'll see.
But it's all the subcontractors in the vast desert regions that support the little triangle floaty things and all the secret space activities that we've got going, as well as the United States Kansas Navy.
Another euphemism for our secret space program.
In any event, it's just very interesting on the gray market.
It's very pleasant.
I enjoyed the whole experience.
It was fun.
I got to walk around and play with tractors and kick tires and see all kinds of weird equipment that they're importing.
And it's 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 an de facto employer.
And 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.
And he does the import duties.
And he actually went to Japan and negotiated contracts and all of this.
But they're actually having to build things like backhoes and front-end loaders and all kinds of implements to fit these tractors because a lot of them were strictly agricultural and are now being used for, as I intend to, for what's called land taming around here, where you have to push some rocks and make a road or 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 ground source air heaters, air heating cooling systems, both for the house I'm in because it'll add value with very little cost.
I suspect outside of the cost of the capital cost of the tractor, the actual cost of the material is the time it takes to dig a hole and lay big plastic pipe and rig the and it'll put rock on it.
And I know what my cost on the rock is going to be for the entire 100-foot run.
I'll have just about $300.
It's $299 in big heavy-duty crushed field rock here that packs really well called driveway rock.
Anyway, and then I've got to buy a couple of large big green things that they stick around the septic tank so that I can use those as plenum.
And then 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 ground source air heating and cooling system for probably under $500, I'm quite sure.
And with all the fiddly bits and everything.
And then the house basically has 80% of its heating and maybe 90% or greater of a really effective cooling system installed.
I've got a thermometer out there now, and my current ground temperature down six feet is 29 degrees cooler than my current air temperature.
Not that I'm particularly suffering.
It's 73 degrees in here now because I've shut some of the fans down in order to do the wujo.
But yeah, it's 29 degrees coolers.
And that's an exposed ground that's been 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 could even chill if I wanted.
I doubt that, though.
Anyway, anyway, so here I am in the gray market, and I'm dealing with Charles and his buddies so that basically so that my vegetable Kale here and myself can move the boat around safely.
It's a big boat, it's 32 feet long, it doesn't weigh that much, but weighs more than either of us, or both of us together.
And so in shifting it, even though we would be using block and tackle and we'd be moving slowly, any misstep, it can get out of control and pull us along with it if we aren't careful.
And the problem is that, as I was a 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, know when you've got a twist in the line that's going to buckle your rigging hardware by counter-twisting against the load, these kind of things.
And so it can become really dangerous.
And as I say, it's probably a thousand-plus pounds of the main vodka hull here that we're going to have to get onto the trailer and this kind of thing.
And so that's my excuse for involving myself 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 another thing I want to talk about in a second.
But I've got to go down and pick up the yurts and truck them back up here, and they're going to be crated.
And so what I'm going to do is to stick a couple of these bolt-on add-on parts to the front-end loader, and I'll be able to turn my tractor into a forklift and be able to lift them off the trailer for quick turnaround and to be able to effectively stack them, which is a real problem if we were trying to do this manually, which was the other option that we would have had.
I could have hired some more vegetable labor temporarily.
Cale could have gotten some of his buddies, and we could have all of us gone out there and sweated for a day and disassembled these things on the semi-truck, taken them out of the crates, moved the crates, and then put the things back into the crates and resealed them because they have to sit there for a while.
But 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 done.
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've always had them and worked on them.
The three cylinders are just great getting things that are.
The tractor I've got here has got 1,300 hours on the engine.
Nothing.
That's trivial.
It's hardly even broken in.
So it's a good machine and non-radioactive.
I really like that.
My brother-in-law and I were joking about last night about, yeah, you don't need them glow-in-the-dark NADs, even though it might help late at night getting up to go pee.
They still have a problem.
But in any event, so yeah, so the trip down to Hokam 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 because everybody was really stupid.
I mean, in the 70s around here, the whole planet was really dumb.
I sat here, I saw it happen, and I wondered why everybody was so stupid.
But 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, anybody who's a bondholder and is foolish enough to stick their money into whoops deserves to have their butt whoops.
But, you know, and that's what happened.
Everybody went whoops, and nothing happened.
The bond people lost their money, unlike the current holders of bonds these days who are protected by law.
And anytime a bondholder anywhere on the planet is threatened with potentially losing money, they just make the Irish give them more.
That's just the way it's going to be, I guess.
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 are given the task of managing a multi-trillion.
Well, it would have been, it was multi-billion at the time, I'm sure, but it would have become a multi-trillion dollar operation with nuke plants everywhere sprouting up in Washington State like mushrooms, and nobody here wanted them.
At least none of the people that were real people.
I mean, it was funny.
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.
We all hated the idea of a nuke plant that close.
These were not well designed.
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 cooling towers, which are really cool.
You're just shooting down State Route, I think, yeah, you're on State Route 8.
And or East 8, they call it.
And scooting on by those, and they got their lights flashing, and they just stand out there.
These just magnificent monuments to whoops.
It's kind of like if we could have the Titanic around, it would convince everybody to, 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 consider whoops.
And anyway, though, I've always thought that they should just seal up the bottom of these things and raise shrimp in them.
The reason being that it's almost impossible to raise high-quality cold water shrimp in an aquaculture situation without the depth of the water.
Those are some mighty big doll fuckers.
They'd hold a lot of water.
And it'd be very effective.
Or you could, you know, have people take diving classes in them and that kind of thing.
Plus, there were a lot of guys who wanted to go and climb the bastards.
But myself among them, it would have been really cool.
Because of the shape of them, they're sort of like a vaguely hourglass shape.
So if you could have ever gotten a lineup on the 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 rappel down that entire length with just a single whoosh until you were down to that bottom edge.
And then kick your feet off and you're good.
Then you drop that last 30 or 40 feet.
Anyway, though, so drove past Satsup, went on out, talked to these guys out in the Gray Market land, and saw lots of tractors, had a good time, picked up this old Hinamoto.
It doesn't have much in the way of hours on it.
It's 20 years old, though.
The seat's torn to hell, and I'm going to 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 the landscape now that I have to.
But some interesting things about all of that, too, was the area down there at Hokiam-Aberdeen.
I'll get back to the yurts in a second.
The Hokwiam and Aberdeen area was not anywhere near as radioactive as it is up here in terms of the background.
So that was 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.
Way beyond my needs.
But just a beautiful piece of property with a house and a couple of barns and stuff on it.
In case anybody's interested, they wanted, I think $350,000 was their asking price.
The reason I went on up there was the guest house on it is one of these squared yurts, a hard-sided yurt, a mountain brand, I think they are out of Montana.
Or maybe it's just Montana brand.
I don't know.
Anyway, they're a hard-sided approach to yurts where they just sort of go along and they square the circle.
And you've got a permanent livable structure that's basically not a tent.
And that's what we've come back to is discussion on the yurts.
I've got to go on down and talk to the guys at Pacific Yurt and put yurt number one into the trailer in the truck and scoot back up here.
But when I go down, I'm going to take this thing that this prototype that I've invented, and we're going to go ahead and proceed with this.
My vegetable, myself, have made a mold, and we're using vacuum forming and some cool stuff, various new materials and some boat building techniques and so forth to build hard sides for our yurt.
Now, these hard sides that I'm building are going to be vacuum formed on the radius.
And we're using radial math.
And so the radius of the 30-foot yurt is 15.
So we're using 15 sections that are 6.28 feet in length in the arc, covering 24 degrees with a drop-off of a 3-degree total error around the whole circumference that's covered by the internal slats that I'm going to use to connect them.
They're basically going to bolt together.
And so you'll, one day after the yurt's up and we've done stuff and so on, then we've got all these panels because I make 15 of them.
I've got the prototype and we're going to actually crank out the first prototype and fire up the vacuum forming stuff on Tuesday tomorrow.
Geez.
On Tuesday.
Yeah, on Tuesday.
After I get back from some other chores.
And so the vegetable number one, Kale and I, will use the vacuums and make big bags and have resin everywhere and all kinds of fun with window putty and great masses of plastic because it's not easy to vacuum bag something this size.
I've done fairly large things before, larger than this, but usually not as bulky because we've got a big form under this in order to enforce the arc.
But here's the upshot of it all.
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 the EU and Belgium.
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 of the people inside and the appliances that they have running, 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 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 real long-term 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 Cale and I are going to take this mold and produce 30 of these panels, because I have two yurts, 15 panels per yurt.
And we're going to produce the required number of panels for the tops of the yurt, for the roof/slash ceiling.
And then we're going to bolt these all together one day after stripping off all of the external cover from the Pacific yurts.
We'll still leave all of the internal frames.
We'll leave the walls.
I've 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.
I've lived in tents in California.
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 vacuumforming 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 the 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 resined and protected against the weather.
But when we're done, these things are going to be R122 by calculation, and 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 U.S. government, for our area here, Western Washington, with all the moisture and the humidity and all this kind of stuff, all the building codes suggest R30 for the roof.
But the actual requirements for most of the structures are R19.
And so here we are with a potential of exceeding that by eight times with our hard-sided panels.
And the beauty of this is that we'll have the yurt set up, we'll have 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, have a dozen basically will 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 similar number along the arc 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.
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 with oxygen fed in.
We couldn't get the thing to burn.
We got it to scorch finally when we were almost out of gas by really increasing the oxygen and getting it really damn close.
But because we're using stuff that alters the thricksotic and other properties of the resin, we can make this stuff basically impervious to temperature up to about 3,000 degrees.
I'm not going that far because the expense involved in taking it over it, but I can get it up to 600 degrees with no problem at all, extremely cheaply.
And so we're going to do that.
So the solid-sided yurt and the ceiling here would require something in excess of 600 degrees before it would begin to show effects from the heat.
And it's going to be one insulated little toasty round house because it'll have at least R120 to it.
So it's kind of a cool process, the whole thing, the vacuum forming and all of this.
And at this stage, I've also got another full-time job, which is teaching the vegetable how to do everything.
He doesn't really know.
He's a kid.
He's never done vacuum forming.
I've never done this sort of screwy stuff that we've got going on here.
And I've also got to teach him to drive the tractor once I figured it out, because, of course, all of the little buttons and everything are in Japanese, and we don't have an English manual.
So I know where the key goes.
I'm going to turn it on.
We're going to start pushing buttons and see what happens.
Such a day.
I've been at it a long time.
Let's see, it's like four in the afternoon, and I've been up since 3, and I drove over a good section of this part of the state.
I was a little tired, and I've still got to get the tractor off, figure out how to get it to back up.
So this will be fun.
Anyway, though, we're getting all set up to do the first of our videos, too, which will be on the ground air source or ground source air heating and cooling system.
And we'll get a video.
I'm going to 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 horizontal run-a-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.
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 packed gravel that you put under it.
So moisture is not a problem.
Even in very moist places where they've discovered these things.
And the Romans built them as far north as in Germany.
So, you know, it's basically the same sort of terrain we have here.
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.
Anyway, but we're going to do a video about how to do this.
It's really simple, very cost-effective.
You can use all different kinds of pipes.
Some people are suggesting we can get PECS that's big enough.
I don't know if you can get PECS large enough.
There's certain constant, there's certain math involved based on the cubic size of the house.
You have to have a certain size pipes, or a whole bunch of them, that kind of a thing.
But you can bring a number of them into a single plenum.
So that makes it very easy as well.
They found them where the plenums were in Turkey where it was very hot.
The plenums were, I think, 18 feet across, basically six cubits, and I think each qubit was three feet in that point.
And so 18 feet in diameter, and they were down nine feet below the surface of the soil.
And so they had a really cool constant temperature.
And then they were radiating out about 100 feet, but there were more than a dozen of them in kind of like a half-star pattern that all fed the same plenum.
And this, 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 an attempt to do a cold house or food storage.
The archaeology on that is uncertain, and I don't necessarily buy the quote experts' opinion on it, simply because the size of the plenum that was used for the volume of the structure that's implied by the foundation just doesn't make sense unless you're trying to get it really cold.
So, you know, and humans have certain tolerances.
Anyway, though, so I'll be wrapping this up fairly quick.
So, yeah, so we're going to go down and introduce Pacific yurts to the idea of vacuum forming hard-sided passive structures out of their existing yurts.
Then I've got a way for actually building the structure 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.
Hard-sided.
You could make it look anything you wanted.
It could be cedar, you can nail them and nail to them and stuff.
I wouldn't recommend it, but you could do a small amount of it.
But they could be made with cedar, you can make them with exotic woods, you can make it so it can be painted.
I mean, like design it to be painted with a special surface to take paint really well, that kind of thing.
So it's very flexible in what can be done with it.
And very cool.
There's other yurt companies that Pacific isn't interested in.
I'm not particularly interested in doing the manufacturing myself.
Once I discover the process, I and 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 post hole digger, but it's for 12 inches for dropping these big poles in for supporting the yurt platform.
As you can see on our round square feet site, roundsquarefeet.com.
We've got some pictures there of the designs for the yurt for that platform.
And eventually I'll put all of our construction related stuff there anyway, even if I put some of it on Half Past Human in the meantime.
But in any event, I've got this post hole digger, and we're going to put in a bunch of when we relocate here and find some property.
And I think I found it.
It's just bloody expensive.
But we're going to dig some holes and we're going to put passive solar panels that I've got, but I'm going to put them on the poles instead of mounting them on the roof.
You don't want to mount them on a tent on a yurt.
But I still want solar panels.
I mean, you know, we're still off-grid.
But what we're going to do, I've got a way of fixing the, of solving some of the problems that are inbuilt in the passive tracker business.
And so we're going to stick some poles in the ground and put these solar panels up there and then go to weld up some interesting little bits and pieces and fabricate some stuff and we'll be able to have a passive tracker that will automatically track the sun without having to be programmed or electrically powered.
So that's kind of cool.
It'll be basically a solar-powered passive solar tracker.
And it's a good design.
And once we've got those going, then we might go into manufacturing on there.
It depends.
You know, the manufacturing infrastructure support in the United States is crap.
So it may not be worthwhile to manufacture it.
It may just be worthwhile to invent it.
We'll see.
Anyway, though, so a tractor for an old man is going to come in handy now, being able to lift up heavy things and shape the land and get ready to put in the platform for the yurts and all of that.
And then the way the plan is that it'll probably be January in the middle of the horrific winter that we're going to get.
By the way, guys, it's going to be a horrific winter, especially along the west coast.
And 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 super insulate, get all my heat sources and everything super prepped.
You know, getting it laying in extra biodiesel.
I've just gone through and tuned up my generator and I've got my batteries all equalized and maximally packed with amp hours just because it's going to settle in on us probably very unexpectedly.
It's part of the oscillation due to the climate change, due to the shift in the 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 pundits are suggesting that, oh, well, we're in global warming, there's going to be this, that, or the other kind of effect.
If they're not suggesting that there's going to be rapid oscillation and moving towards a sudden and prolonged 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 fields, so to speak.
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.
I'm still doing some calculations.
If we're at 1.5 degrees, as I seem to think we are in terms of the northern range of the solar of the sun rise and set, then that would imply that we're going to get about 12 more days, like 11 point something more days 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 solar radiation.
In the process of shifting, the magnetosphere is going to go wonky for a while.
That'll be very dangerous.
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, doesn't look quite as big as it used to when I was a kid.
And then you'll also notice that, you know, the days are a little bit wonky and the calendar is a little wonky.
Not all pear-shaped, the way the Brits would say, but you know, sort of plum-shaped, not quite apple.
And so 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 count and so on relative to planting and this kind of a deal.
But for an unknown number of years, we're going to 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 sorry about that.
But as I was saying, so food crops will be affected.
Oceans will be affected.
It's a matter of the penetration levels of the light, blue versus red frequencies, how deep they'll go, the heating impact.
Carbon dioxide absorption will be different.
Methane exhalation from the planet will be different.
That's primarily from the volcanoes.
There's going to be a new factor pretty soon, and that is this crustal goo, the actual separation of the planet itself, the growth of the crust.
We'll shift some of them.
We'll have like methane landslides beneath the ocean where vast fields of them will slide down into the new deeper abyss as these trenches and cracks open up.
But in doing so, some of it may be released.
Some of them may actually float up.
We just don't know what the impact's going to be there.
It's probably unpredictable.
Anyway, so there's all this sort of stuff going on, and it is going to 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 going to have an ice age has to do with the annual cycles in, or the 100,000 annual cycles 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 some seriousness.
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 discussed repeatedly and in depth throughout the 50s by a lot of the science guys.
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 in spring.
All of that kind of thing is actually sort of happening.
It can be expected to continue for some time as the planet goes about this little shift and we end up in this new location.
It will cause some level of disruption.
A number of points have been cited in our ALTA report.
It doesn't really matter.
It'll all come out in the end in the sense that we'll all live through it.
So we're sort of preparing for the first of the hard edges that are going to hit us this year.
I suspect 2013 will be a particularly pivotal year for a number of reasons.
And one of the things that we'll see, if I'm right, we're going to have a very harsh winter along the west coast this year, potentially lots of snow.
If not snow, because of the temperature, then vast quantities of rain and flooding beyond anything we've ever had to endure to this point.
And so we're now going to be faced with the amount of moisture coming down, you know, a whole month's worth coming down in five hours, that sort of thing.
So it'll be very nasty for us, and I'm getting ready for that.
But we won't be alone in this.
North America is going to really suffer this year in ways we did not in last year's winter, except in places like Canada and then, you know, of course, all of the disastrous tornadoes.
Now we're going to have ice.
We had a really nasty winter last year.
I mean, don't get me wrong, but it's not comparable to some of the, you know, we set all kinds of records, but it wasn't as though we ended up with one of the perfect storm kind of winters where there was, you know, nine feet of snow everywhere along the east coast.
But we've got, we're facing that kind of winter in 2013 and 2014, and then something similar probably in 2015-16.
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 snoop in and have a look.
And the weather trends are still clocking towards a very exceptionally harsh, as the linguistics are defining it.
Basically, it's probably going to be a harsh winter.
And hey, you know, grasshopper and ant kind of thing.
Now's the time, grasshopper, to think like an ant.
So anyway, guys, I've got to go out and see if I can figure out how to start the Heenimoto tractor and back the bugger up off the trailer and then put everything away.
And I'll post this later.
The Ultra report is shipping.
If you have problems, let us know and I'll get at it and fix it.
But we're out doing stuff, so you've got to give us a little patience.
We're not monitoring the equipment all the time now.
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