Depends on your criteria. My thinking is that they used the following:
1. The belief that newer is better: check
2. Can be operated by a trained monkey: check
3. Is at least as effective as existing scanners: check
4. Allows the TSA/DHS to increase our budget: check
5. Gives the appearance of doing something: check
6. Gives the appearance of improving things: check
7. Has a name that implies it is better: check
8. Is provided by a company that someone in TSA/DHS management will be working for shortly: check
9. Will make the public feel safer: check
I am sure there were other requirements but these cover the basics of the selection criteria.
It is actually very combustible across a broad range of mixtures. I believe that the hydrogen percentage can be anywhere from about 5% to about 95% and it will ignite.
With a cheap enough energy source you could pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and create liquid fuels. The process for doing this from more carbon dense feedstocks is well understood and has been used in the past to create various motor fuels. For referance I suggest seeing:
1. The Fischer-Tropsch process
2. Flash Pyrolysis
3. Thermal Depolymerization
4. Staged Reforming
With really cheap (think you pay for your connection but it is all you can pull in) abundant energy lot of things are worth doing now that weren't before, like creating synthetic gasoline, synthetic liquid fuels, synthetic crude oil, water desalination from the ocean, rare earth metal extraction from the oceans, farm towers, irrigating entire deserts because we can,etc.
25KW is pretty useless considering that you can cheaply buy home gasoline generators that produce 6-7KW already. I have seen some larger construction site diesel generators that are in the 10-15KW range but even that is still pretty puny as they could easily be transported by a truck and often have a built in stick or wire feed welder and compressor. When talking thousands put into a metro area you will want generators in the 1-5MW range if not larger unless you want everyone to have their own generator in which case a 25KW one would power a few houses.
Then borrow a good vacuum and see how much crap a Dyson leaves behind. Seriously I had a friend who insisted that the Dyson was the best vacuum ever. I got sick of hearing about it so I had him bring it over and we tested his Dyson, my wet/dry shop vac, and my second hand Kriby on the carpet in the back of my Jeep Cherokee (really fucking nasty). Both of my vacuums did a better job (single pass over a strip of carpet) than the Dyson and wet/dry shop vac doesn't have a beater brush.The Dyson may not lose suction but it doesn't have much to lose I want a vacuum that can suck a golf ball through a garden hose. On a hard surface a cotton rag mop and wringer bucket with hot water and a bit of bleach will do wonders.
I have a small Kirby that I use for cleaning out vehicles it is awesome. It was my mom's vacuum and use to have a bunch of attachments but most of them broke or were lost a long time ago so I asked if I could have it when she bought a new different vacuum. Seriously that little vacuum sucks like a black hole with daddy issues.
Here is the abstract from the work done in Leipzig. Also if you happen to have access to Wiley Online Library or Wiley InterScience you can read the full publication here, I don't so I am not sure if that gets you all the way there or not.
I would hardly call it lots of effort even for my small garden. I was about 4 hours of real half ass work, while drinking some beers and talking to my good next door neighbor, this spring to turn the soil using a shovel another couple of house a few days later to get everything in, weed once a week for a few weeks until the veggies get established (like 3 weeks at 15 minutes each) and then water it if we didn't rain in a week. The biggest effort comes in the fall when the plants have died and I amend the soil with the fallen leaves and mix those in, but even there I would have to deal with the leaves from the trees. As far as making terra preta that is easy as I have a pile of tree trimming from the trees (you need to trim your trees anyway) that I char, then mix in some manure and add in fish heads, guts, and bones from the fish that I have caught. The new terra preta gets mixed into the soil with the leaves from the trees in the fall as well as the barbecue ash. All of those items would normally go into the trash but instead I have used them to produce probably the most fertile soil in my town. I have a real full time job, maintain and repair my house and family vehicles, spend tons of time with my kids, and do all the gardening my self as my wife refuses to so it isn't like I am expending massive amounts of effort for the "pittance" of food you claim I am getting.
The right kind of veggies produce an ass load of food per plant. Things like squash and cucumbers produce so much that I have been giving them away at work as well as eating it every day for several weeks and making pickles. I am getting kind of board with tomatoes as those are something else that we have been eating every day for over a month, not to mention the large quantity of tomatoes that I turned into 3 gallons of chile (along with the peppers from the garden) and 2 gallons of pasta sauce both of which I canned up. In another couple of weeks I will probably be able to can up another 3 gallons of chile with tomatoes and peppers from the garden. Also I get probably 50-60 pounds of usable apples and pears each year and there comes a point at which you just get sick of apple sauce, pear sauce, apple pie, pear preservers, and pear jelly. All of that comes from my 200 square foot garden, the apple tree and the pear tree. If I really wanted to or needed to I could probably turn my entire yard (I am on a.49 acre plot) into a garden and would probably come close to producing enough food for my family but then I have never bothered to do the calculations to see how close I come. If I needed to do that I would forget about planting peppers and would go with either more broccoli, tomatoes, carrots, etc and would probably switch out the sweet corn for field corn as that would store better and provide a higher yield. I would still have the squash and beans.
Out of curiosity what do decent telescopes run and where does one buy them? I have a crappy 6" tasco one from when I was a kid that works well for looking at the moon, and limited planet viewing but sucks for everything else.
HOA suck anyways and I am glad I don't have one in my neighborhood, although a lot of my coworkers are shocked that I would live in a community without one. If we were to have one they would have a difficult time with my neighbors in general as they are very blue collier as am I with:
my good next door neighbor doing lots of side auto mechanic jobs out of his garage
my neighbor directly across the street keeping his old derelict work van next to house as storage for some of his work tools and equipment
my shitty neighbor who owns 6 vehicles and now has 3 sheds on his property
the neighbor across the street and up 2 houses who has a landscape business and keeps his equipment in his backyard
You are correct in the amount of food even a small backyard garden can produce. My small 10'x20' garden produces more food than I know what to reasonably do with, 4 tomato plants (2 cherry, 2 large), 6 assorted pepper plants, 1 yellow squash, 1 zucchini, 1 cucumber, 1 acorn squash 10 sweet corn stalks, 4 broccoli plants, 10 green bean plants. To maximize yields and keep up the soil health I practice some three sisters farming as well as working to create terra preta in my garden plot. I also have an apple and pear tree that once I started taking care of, unlike the previous owner, produce more fruit than we eat in a year. I end up dumping the not fit for human consumption apple and pears up where I hunt to feed the deer so that they have something other than acorns to eat before the hunting season so they are well fed. I don't make big piles as I don't want the deer nose to nose as that spreads disease like Bovine TB and CWD but will have a few 5 gallon buckets (3-4 usually) full that I will fling the contents around where my uncle, cousin, and I hunt. This usually happens in the middle of September and the deer season in the beginning of November so it isn't baiting, which I hate, as the food is long gone before the season starts.
Yes but the corn that is used for making fuels is field corn not sweetcorn or popcorn. The problem is that with the astronomical corn prices (field corn) lots of acreage that could have produced sweetcorn or popcorn was planted with field corn instead. To further make matters worse lots of acreage that would normally have been planted with wheat, oats, soybeans, barley, hay, etc that was capable of producing field corn was plated with field corn instead. Now toss in a crop failures around the globe as well as mandates that we convert a sizable portion of our field corn crop to ethanol (reliable estimates I have found put it at about 40%) and you have the massive rise in not only corn but other grains (less acres and lower yield because of the crop failures) and things that use grain as an input. A recent article that covers some of these issues that I found in a quick search is this one from National Geographic. I have seen other ones in my local paper but don't feel like trying to track those down.
You would be surprised at how much field corn is consumed by people. Granted most of it has been processed into stuff like corn oil, corn syrup, alcohol, corn meal or has been fed to critters like poultry, hogs, or cattle which are then consumed by people. Sweet corn and pop corn make up only a small amount of the total corn acreage but are the only types of corn most people are aware of.
I still go and glean the fields after harvest for potatoes. The harvesting machines do well with regular shaped potatoes but ones that are fairly irregular the machines processes them as rocks and dumps them out the back. I go and get a 50 pound sack of irregular shaped potatoes for $5 but I have to go and spend the 20 minutes to go pick them up out of the field as well. The farmers who raise potatoes near me do this as they can make a few extra bucks after the mechanical harvester have gone through and if you don't really care about the shape it is a great deal. With the odd shapes they work best for making mashed potatoes, potato pancakes, hash browns, and stews where you don't need to peel them. The only problem is that you need to consume them or process them before they go bad.
The biggest concern is with contamination of bacteria or botulism. These are easily avoidable if your follow some basic cleanliness procedures. Some basic things are to not touch the inside of the jar or lid, don't reuse lids (you can reuse rings if they are in good shape) clean your stuff and process it correctly. When I can up stuff the jars have been previously sent through the dish washer with the final rinse being a sanitizing rinse. I put the rings and lids in a pan of boiling water and the jars upside down in another pan of boiling water. This will keep everything nice a sterile until you need it in a few minutes. The food that I put into the jars is very and hot and at a nice simmer and I fill the jar with a clean ladle being careful to not spill onto the rim of the jar. Then put a clean lid on (I use tongs that are sitting in the boiling water with the lids and rings) and then put the ring on. I then put the jar into the pressure canner which is open but has boiling water in it. I repeat this until I have filled the canner or am out of food and then close up the canner. Typically what I can isn't affected (flavor or texture wise) by heat so I prefer to process it at 15lbs of pressure even though I could get away with only 10lbs because I would rather be safe than sorry this is also why I will leave the jars in longer than the minimum recommended time (maybe 5 minutes longer).
The site I provided previously was not the one I was originally thinking of as a good site is Colorado State which has a bunch of stuff on canning and preserving food with more detail but at the time I only remembered it was a.edu site. I learned the basics of canning and preserving from my grandmother and since she gave up pressure canning (she still does jellies and jams) I have most of her canning equipment but she still has her hot water bath canner. Also if you want to get a pressure canner don't think that a pressure cooker will work as the walls on those are too thin and they cool down too fast which can lead to things not being held at the correct temp for long enough.
If you really want to save your self some money buy a bunch of canning supplies and learn how to can food your self. I can lots of stuff and this weekend I canned ~2 gallons of homemade pasta sauce, the previous weekend I canned up ~5 gallons of chile, and next weekend I am planning on making and canning a bunch of beef and Guinness stew. I will also can soups, other sauces, veggies, pickles, pickled peppers, jelly, etc. Typically they will keep for a over a year when stored in a cool dark place (basement closet) and it keeps my freezer space open. I end up splitting 1/4 of cow and 1/4 of a bison each year with my father as well as usually getting a deer so freezer space is a premium and before the next year's meat arrives I use the lower quality cuts (round steak and chuck roast) in stew and chile so that it won't get buried in the freezer. Also it is a great use of the fresh produce I grow in the garden so that it also doesn't go to waste. As an added benefit I have good food ready made (just reheat) that I can use when I don't feel like cooking fresh food. Over the course of the year my family will consume the food I canned so it's not like I have some retarded stockpile of food but if we lost power or had some disaster that lasted a few weeks we wouldn't have any problems. I also have a fair amount of tinned food that I bought at the store like some soups and baked beans (seriously why not stock up when it goes on sale if you actually eat it) as well as dried pasta that keeps just fine on the the pantry shelf. There are some foods that I buy in the grocery store that come in MRE packing but that is a brand of Indian food that is like $1.25 per package and one pack is a meal. They have various curries as well as rice dishes so if you have 2 people (or are really hungry) you make up a bag of rice and a bag of curry. One of the benefits I discovered about the Indian food in a bag is you can cook it while still in the bag so you don't even need potable water. This has come in handy when I last went up to the BWCA and brought some along instead of only relying on the traditional dehydrated, or packaged food the guide companies provide you with (even MREs would be a vast improvement over dehydrated powdered scrambled eggs).
I couldn't agree more with the hype about organic vs non organic. I have found that most produce and meat are pretty bad at the supermarket, even if it is organic and that there really isn't an appreciable difference other than price. This seems to be mostly centered around the fact that for produce it was picked before it was ripe and then spent the last 5-7 days being shipped and in storage. The veggies I grow are better than the organic ones at the store even though they don't qualify as organic mostly because I can go pick them when they are perfect.
With meat it seems it is a race to the bottom in terms of price and quality with beef probably being the worst. One of my dad's friends raises cattle (not organic only because he will give them antibiotics if they get sick and the alfalfa he grows isn't certified organic) and my father and I talk to him about raising cattle as it is good to know where your food comes from. Farmer Steve has 40 acres and raises 10-12 head of cattle each year which just roam free on his property. Over the past 28 years he as only lost 2 cattle thie first was in 1996 during the winter when it got down below -40F and one 3 years ago to wolves. The cattle are mostly fed alfalfa with some grain (no corn, but barley, rye, or wheat) before they are sent to slaughter. Last year when my dad and I were heading up to pickup the beef we saw some farmers bailing corn stalks and asked Steve about it. We found out that it is used as an ultra low cost silage for cattle but to get the cattle to actually eat it they need to mix in some more palatable stuff. Granted there is plenty of good things to make silage from like alfalfa or hay that they cattle will actually eat without trickery so silage isn't a bad thing. The problem is that most of the meat bought at the grocery store was probably fed a steady diet of corn and low end silage (fermented corn stalks), packed in with 100+ cattle per 40 acre, and then was knee deep in its own filth at the feed lot before slaughter. Those animals are malnourished from eating a crappy diet, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, and stressed as hell from the crappy conditions. Sadly the meat my father and I get from Steve is cheaper than what people pay at the grocery store for even low quality ground beef (72% lean is the cheapest crappy stuff I have seen) but is much better quality and includes good roasts and steaks. The meat is also processed at a small processor that has won tons of quality, cleanliness, and butchering awards from national and state inspectors and competitions. The best is when people wonder why the meat I cook is so much better than what they cook even though I don't tell them where I get my meat from. My dad has similar experiences and even we people use the same ingredients are left wondering why my dad's food tastes better.
That sounds like how I get a lot of stuff. The best free trash I got was my snow blower that didn't run when I saw it in a free pile at the end of someone's driveway. Took it home put in a new switch, new spark plug, cleaned the carb, cleaned the engine, and put in some new gaskets and the thing has run like a champ for the past 7 years. It only cost me about $6 to fix initially and since they I have only had to get a new belt for it which cost me $18. I also like the free piles of stuff at the recycling center/hazardous waste disposal site as I have picked up a number of things there like a few spare bars and chains for my chain saw, an old metal trike for my oldest son (it was rusty and crusty but once cleaned, striped, and repainted is a really nice trike), deck stain, mineral spirits and other solvents. I suppose that it helps that I grew up poor and my dad did similar things and I learned how to fix and restore things from him.
That would be a great attack vector. What I find humorous about that is that if there were real explosives that someone dumped in the trash can it's not like Rubbermaid 55 gallon bin would stop much of anything. If I were a terrorist I would be targeting the security measures. Such things like dropping a bomb into a TSA trash can, detonating a suicide bomber while in line, shooting up a bunch of a people just before going through the scanners, etc.
They wouldn't even have to be rather determined. My favorite scenario would be a carry on roller bag filled with smokeless powder (legally and easily acquirable) and nails, ball bearings, or nuts detonated in a crowded area like an airport security line or mall (especially during the holiday shopping season). There is also the shooter with a semi-automatic handgun with a few clips in these same areas. If you want cheap and really you could always go and get a few mason jars and fill them with gasoline and shove a rag through a hole in the lid, light and toss in these same crowded areas. Anyone with the reasoning ability slightly greater than a toaster oven could come up with many other scenarios like this and pull them off. This should basically prove that there aren't any real terrorist threats to the US since we don't see people lobbing Molotov Cocktails onto unsuspecting shoppers from the upper levels of a mall.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that distinction went to the Pontiac Aztec.
Second generation != better
Depends on your criteria. My thinking is that they used the following:
1. The belief that newer is better: check
2. Can be operated by a trained monkey: check
3. Is at least as effective as existing scanners: check
4. Allows the TSA/DHS to increase our budget: check
5. Gives the appearance of doing something: check
6. Gives the appearance of improving things: check
7. Has a name that implies it is better: check
8. Is provided by a company that someone in TSA/DHS management will be working for shortly: check
9. Will make the public feel safer: check
I am sure there were other requirements but these cover the basics of the selection criteria.
It is actually very combustible across a broad range of mixtures. I believe that the hydrogen percentage can be anywhere from about 5% to about 95% and it will ignite.
With a cheap enough energy source you could pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and create liquid fuels. The process for doing this from more carbon dense feedstocks is well understood and has been used in the past to create various motor fuels. For referance I suggest seeing:
1. The Fischer-Tropsch process
2. Flash Pyrolysis
3. Thermal Depolymerization
4. Staged Reforming
With really cheap (think you pay for your connection but it is all you can pull in) abundant energy lot of things are worth doing now that weren't before, like creating synthetic gasoline, synthetic liquid fuels, synthetic crude oil, water desalination from the ocean, rare earth metal extraction from the oceans, farm towers, irrigating entire deserts because we can,etc.
25KW is pretty useless considering that you can cheaply buy home gasoline generators that produce 6-7KW already. I have seen some larger construction site diesel generators that are in the 10-15KW range but even that is still pretty puny as they could easily be transported by a truck and often have a built in stick or wire feed welder and compressor. When talking thousands put into a metro area you will want generators in the 1-5MW range if not larger unless you want everyone to have their own generator in which case a 25KW one would power a few houses.
Then borrow a good vacuum and see how much crap a Dyson leaves behind. Seriously I had a friend who insisted that the Dyson was the best vacuum ever. I got sick of hearing about it so I had him bring it over and we tested his Dyson, my wet/dry shop vac, and my second hand Kriby on the carpet in the back of my Jeep Cherokee (really fucking nasty). Both of my vacuums did a better job (single pass over a strip of carpet) than the Dyson and wet/dry shop vac doesn't have a beater brush.The Dyson may not lose suction but it doesn't have much to lose I want a vacuum that can suck a golf ball through a garden hose. On a hard surface a cotton rag mop and wringer bucket with hot water and a bit of bleach will do wonders.
I have a small Kirby that I use for cleaning out vehicles it is awesome. It was my mom's vacuum and use to have a bunch of attachments but most of them broke or were lost a long time ago so I asked if I could have it when she bought a new different vacuum. Seriously that little vacuum sucks like a black hole with daddy issues.
I want some of those drives. On second though I probably don't (if it sounds too good).
Essential tools:
Duct Tape - For when something moves and shouldn't
WD-40 - For when something should move and won't
Hammer - For everything else
Here is the abstract from the work done in Leipzig. Also if you happen to have access to Wiley Online Library or Wiley InterScience you can read the full publication here, I don't so I am not sure if that gets you all the way there or not.
Now that would just be perverse.
I would hardly call it lots of effort even for my small garden. I was about 4 hours of real half ass work, while drinking some beers and talking to my good next door neighbor, this spring to turn the soil using a shovel another couple of house a few days later to get everything in, weed once a week for a few weeks until the veggies get established (like 3 weeks at 15 minutes each) and then water it if we didn't rain in a week. The biggest effort comes in the fall when the plants have died and I amend the soil with the fallen leaves and mix those in, but even there I would have to deal with the leaves from the trees. As far as making terra preta that is easy as I have a pile of tree trimming from the trees (you need to trim your trees anyway) that I char, then mix in some manure and add in fish heads, guts, and bones from the fish that I have caught. The new terra preta gets mixed into the soil with the leaves from the trees in the fall as well as the barbecue ash. All of those items would normally go into the trash but instead I have used them to produce probably the most fertile soil in my town. I have a real full time job, maintain and repair my house and family vehicles, spend tons of time with my kids, and do all the gardening my self as my wife refuses to so it isn't like I am expending massive amounts of effort for the "pittance" of food you claim I am getting.
.49 acre plot) into a garden and would probably come close to producing enough food for my family but then I have never bothered to do the calculations to see how close I come. If I needed to do that I would forget about planting peppers and would go with either more broccoli, tomatoes, carrots, etc and would probably switch out the sweet corn for field corn as that would store better and provide a higher yield. I would still have the squash and beans.
The right kind of veggies produce an ass load of food per plant. Things like squash and cucumbers produce so much that I have been giving them away at work as well as eating it every day for several weeks and making pickles. I am getting kind of board with tomatoes as those are something else that we have been eating every day for over a month, not to mention the large quantity of tomatoes that I turned into 3 gallons of chile (along with the peppers from the garden) and 2 gallons of pasta sauce both of which I canned up. In another couple of weeks I will probably be able to can up another 3 gallons of chile with tomatoes and peppers from the garden. Also I get probably 50-60 pounds of usable apples and pears each year and there comes a point at which you just get sick of apple sauce, pear sauce, apple pie, pear preservers, and pear jelly. All of that comes from my 200 square foot garden, the apple tree and the pear tree. If I really wanted to or needed to I could probably turn my entire yard (I am on a
Out of curiosity what do decent telescopes run and where does one buy them? I have a crappy 6" tasco one from when I was a kid that works well for looking at the moon, and limited planet viewing but sucks for everything else.
HOA suck anyways and I am glad I don't have one in my neighborhood, although a lot of my coworkers are shocked that I would live in a community without one. If we were to have one they would have a difficult time with my neighbors in general as they are very blue collier as am I with:
my good next door neighbor doing lots of side auto mechanic jobs out of his garage
my neighbor directly across the street keeping his old derelict work van next to house as storage for some of his work tools and equipment
my shitty neighbor who owns 6 vehicles and now has 3 sheds on his property
the neighbor across the street and up 2 houses who has a landscape business and keeps his equipment in his backyard
You are correct in the amount of food even a small backyard garden can produce. My small 10'x20' garden produces more food than I know what to reasonably do with, 4 tomato plants (2 cherry, 2 large), 6 assorted pepper plants, 1 yellow squash, 1 zucchini, 1 cucumber, 1 acorn squash 10 sweet corn stalks, 4 broccoli plants, 10 green bean plants. To maximize yields and keep up the soil health I practice some three sisters farming as well as working to create terra preta in my garden plot. I also have an apple and pear tree that once I started taking care of, unlike the previous owner, produce more fruit than we eat in a year. I end up dumping the not fit for human consumption apple and pears up where I hunt to feed the deer so that they have something other than acorns to eat before the hunting season so they are well fed. I don't make big piles as I don't want the deer nose to nose as that spreads disease like Bovine TB and CWD but will have a few 5 gallon buckets (3-4 usually) full that I will fling the contents around where my uncle, cousin, and I hunt. This usually happens in the middle of September and the deer season in the beginning of November so it isn't baiting, which I hate, as the food is long gone before the season starts.
Yes but the corn that is used for making fuels is field corn not sweetcorn or popcorn. The problem is that with the astronomical corn prices (field corn) lots of acreage that could have produced sweetcorn or popcorn was planted with field corn instead. To further make matters worse lots of acreage that would normally have been planted with wheat, oats, soybeans, barley, hay, etc that was capable of producing field corn was plated with field corn instead. Now toss in a crop failures around the globe as well as mandates that we convert a sizable portion of our field corn crop to ethanol (reliable estimates I have found put it at about 40%) and you have the massive rise in not only corn but other grains (less acres and lower yield because of the crop failures) and things that use grain as an input. A recent article that covers some of these issues that I found in a quick search is this one from National Geographic. I have seen other ones in my local paper but don't feel like trying to track those down.
You would be surprised at how much field corn is consumed by people. Granted most of it has been processed into stuff like corn oil, corn syrup, alcohol, corn meal or has been fed to critters like poultry, hogs, or cattle which are then consumed by people. Sweet corn and pop corn make up only a small amount of the total corn acreage but are the only types of corn most people are aware of.
Hey seaweed is awesome. Press it, dry it , salt and spice it and it is delicious. I eat a couple of packages a week as snacks at my desk.
I still go and glean the fields after harvest for potatoes. The harvesting machines do well with regular shaped potatoes but ones that are fairly irregular the machines processes them as rocks and dumps them out the back. I go and get a 50 pound sack of irregular shaped potatoes for $5 but I have to go and spend the 20 minutes to go pick them up out of the field as well. The farmers who raise potatoes near me do this as they can make a few extra bucks after the mechanical harvester have gone through and if you don't really care about the shape it is a great deal. With the odd shapes they work best for making mashed potatoes, potato pancakes, hash browns, and stews where you don't need to peel them. The only problem is that you need to consume them or process them before they go bad.
The biggest concern is with contamination of bacteria or botulism. These are easily avoidable if your follow some basic cleanliness procedures. Some basic things are to not touch the inside of the jar or lid, don't reuse lids (you can reuse rings if they are in good shape) clean your stuff and process it correctly. When I can up stuff the jars have been previously sent through the dish washer with the final rinse being a sanitizing rinse. I put the rings and lids in a pan of boiling water and the jars upside down in another pan of boiling water. This will keep everything nice a sterile until you need it in a few minutes. The food that I put into the jars is very and hot and at a nice simmer and I fill the jar with a clean ladle being careful to not spill onto the rim of the jar. Then put a clean lid on (I use tongs that are sitting in the boiling water with the lids and rings) and then put the ring on. I then put the jar into the pressure canner which is open but has boiling water in it. I repeat this until I have filled the canner or am out of food and then close up the canner. Typically what I can isn't affected (flavor or texture wise) by heat so I prefer to process it at 15lbs of pressure even though I could get away with only 10lbs because I would rather be safe than sorry this is also why I will leave the jars in longer than the minimum recommended time (maybe 5 minutes longer).
.edu site. I learned the basics of canning and preserving from my grandmother and since she gave up pressure canning (she still does jellies and jams) I have most of her canning equipment but she still has her hot water bath canner. Also if you want to get a pressure canner don't think that a pressure cooker will work as the walls on those are too thin and they cool down too fast which can lead to things not being held at the correct temp for long enough.
The site I provided previously was not the one I was originally thinking of as a good site is Colorado State which has a bunch of stuff on canning and preserving food with more detail but at the time I only remembered it was a
Except for riots. And earthquakes. And the whole place burning down every year.
That actually sounds exactly like I see it on tv, actually better since you left out gang violence, but then I imagine that is like what I see on TV.
If you really want to save your self some money buy a bunch of canning supplies and learn how to can food your self. I can lots of stuff and this weekend I canned ~2 gallons of homemade pasta sauce, the previous weekend I canned up ~5 gallons of chile, and next weekend I am planning on making and canning a bunch of beef and Guinness stew. I will also can soups, other sauces, veggies, pickles, pickled peppers, jelly, etc. Typically they will keep for a over a year when stored in a cool dark place (basement closet) and it keeps my freezer space open. I end up splitting 1/4 of cow and 1/4 of a bison each year with my father as well as usually getting a deer so freezer space is a premium and before the next year's meat arrives I use the lower quality cuts (round steak and chuck roast) in stew and chile so that it won't get buried in the freezer. Also it is a great use of the fresh produce I grow in the garden so that it also doesn't go to waste. As an added benefit I have good food ready made (just reheat) that I can use when I don't feel like cooking fresh food. Over the course of the year my family will consume the food I canned so it's not like I have some retarded stockpile of food but if we lost power or had some disaster that lasted a few weeks we wouldn't have any problems. I also have a fair amount of tinned food that I bought at the store like some soups and baked beans (seriously why not stock up when it goes on sale if you actually eat it) as well as dried pasta that keeps just fine on the the pantry shelf. There are some foods that I buy in the grocery store that come in MRE packing but that is a brand of Indian food that is like $1.25 per package and one pack is a meal. They have various curries as well as rice dishes so if you have 2 people (or are really hungry) you make up a bag of rice and a bag of curry. One of the benefits I discovered about the Indian food in a bag is you can cook it while still in the bag so you don't even need potable water. This has come in handy when I last went up to the BWCA and brought some along instead of only relying on the traditional dehydrated, or packaged food the guide companies provide you with (even MREs would be a vast improvement over dehydrated powdered scrambled eggs).
I couldn't agree more with the hype about organic vs non organic. I have found that most produce and meat are pretty bad at the supermarket, even if it is organic and that there really isn't an appreciable difference other than price. This seems to be mostly centered around the fact that for produce it was picked before it was ripe and then spent the last 5-7 days being shipped and in storage. The veggies I grow are better than the organic ones at the store even though they don't qualify as organic mostly because I can go pick them when they are perfect.
With meat it seems it is a race to the bottom in terms of price and quality with beef probably being the worst. One of my dad's friends raises cattle (not organic only because he will give them antibiotics if they get sick and the alfalfa he grows isn't certified organic) and my father and I talk to him about raising cattle as it is good to know where your food comes from. Farmer Steve has 40 acres and raises 10-12 head of cattle each year which just roam free on his property. Over the past 28 years he as only lost 2 cattle thie first was in 1996 during the winter when it got down below -40F and one 3 years ago to wolves. The cattle are mostly fed alfalfa with some grain (no corn, but barley, rye, or wheat) before they are sent to slaughter. Last year when my dad and I were heading up to pickup the beef we saw some farmers bailing corn stalks and asked Steve about it. We found out that it is used as an ultra low cost silage for cattle but to get the cattle to actually eat it they need to mix in some more palatable stuff. Granted there is plenty of good things to make silage from like alfalfa or hay that they cattle will actually eat without trickery so silage isn't a bad thing. The problem is that most of the meat bought at the grocery store was probably fed a steady diet of corn and low end silage (fermented corn stalks), packed in with 100+ cattle per 40 acre, and then was knee deep in its own filth at the feed lot before slaughter. Those animals are malnourished from eating a crappy diet, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, and stressed as hell from the crappy conditions. Sadly the meat my father and I get from Steve is cheaper than what people pay at the grocery store for even low quality ground beef (72% lean is the cheapest crappy stuff I have seen) but is much better quality and includes good roasts and steaks. The meat is also processed at a small processor that has won tons of quality, cleanliness, and butchering awards from national and state inspectors and competitions. The best is when people wonder why the meat I cook is so much better than what they cook even though I don't tell them where I get my meat from. My dad has similar experiences and even we people use the same ingredients are left wondering why my dad's food tastes better.
That sounds like how I get a lot of stuff. The best free trash I got was my snow blower that didn't run when I saw it in a free pile at the end of someone's driveway. Took it home put in a new switch, new spark plug, cleaned the carb, cleaned the engine, and put in some new gaskets and the thing has run like a champ for the past 7 years. It only cost me about $6 to fix initially and since they I have only had to get a new belt for it which cost me $18. I also like the free piles of stuff at the recycling center/hazardous waste disposal site as I have picked up a number of things there like a few spare bars and chains for my chain saw, an old metal trike for my oldest son (it was rusty and crusty but once cleaned, striped, and repainted is a really nice trike), deck stain, mineral spirits and other solvents. I suppose that it helps that I grew up poor and my dad did similar things and I learned how to fix and restore things from him.
That would be a great attack vector. What I find humorous about that is that if there were real explosives that someone dumped in the trash can it's not like Rubbermaid 55 gallon bin would stop much of anything. If I were a terrorist I would be targeting the security measures. Such things like dropping a bomb into a TSA trash can, detonating a suicide bomber while in line, shooting up a bunch of a people just before going through the scanners, etc.
They wouldn't even have to be rather determined. My favorite scenario would be a carry on roller bag filled with smokeless powder (legally and easily acquirable) and nails, ball bearings, or nuts detonated in a crowded area like an airport security line or mall (especially during the holiday shopping season). There is also the shooter with a semi-automatic handgun with a few clips in these same areas. If you want cheap and really you could always go and get a few mason jars and fill them with gasoline and shove a rag through a hole in the lid, light and toss in these same crowded areas. Anyone with the reasoning ability slightly greater than a toaster oven could come up with many other scenarios like this and pull them off. This should basically prove that there aren't any real terrorist threats to the US since we don't see people lobbing Molotov Cocktails onto unsuspecting shoppers from the upper levels of a mall.