How to Recondition a Battery, Ammo Regs, Who Can You Trust?

Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

http://www.PoorManSurvival.com

For Independent Minded People!

ISSN 2161-5543

In This Issue:

1.        How to recondition a battery

2.       DIY Solar Charger

3.       DIY Backyard Solar Greenhouse

4.       Ammo regulation-killing your gun rights

5.       Who can you trust these days?

“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is." – Political consultant Mark Hanna, 1896

Heartless Uncertainty in the Workplace


When Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were building HP in the '60s and '70s, the company was justly famous for its management practices, known as the "HP Way." HP had an exceptional bond with its employees, much of it due to its refusal to lay people off when revenues got tight. This generated tremendous loyalty, "esprit de corps" and productivity, too.

Now, alas, forget about it. The HP Way died some years ago, and the company just announced more layoffs - 27,000 employees will lose their jobs.

This is not to diss HP; after all, every day, companies change their management styles. Rather, it's to underline a new acronym, the one that replaced "HP" - HU.

HU stands for Heartless Uncertainty.

The Poor Man routinely features resources for starting a sideline business and/or sideline jobs.  It’s become a necessity in today’s marketplace.

Develop multiple streams of income. Besides your main gig, consider blogging or website testing or online research, or community moderation or selling crafts on Etsy. Or doing things on Fiverr.com for $5, or virtual tasks on Taskrabbit.com. Keep multiple irons in the fire.

You may also want to check our new Marketplace section at our main PoorManSurvival.com site where you can post your wants and needs, services or find at-home sideline income opportunities, etc…this is a new addition to our service.  Also, check our BootStrapBiz section and jobs page at our main site for resources as we update them frequently.  http://www.poormansurvival.com/Pages/Marketplace.aspx

Get garden supplies for a buck.  Just head to your local dollar store.  You can find seeds, gloves, trowels, watering cans, spray bottles and more for a fraction of the cost at big box stores.

PM’s Compendium of Useful Resources

How to Recondition your battery

In this introduction on how to recondition or revive old discarded batteries we will explain the basics of battery reconditioning.

Once you have learned the methods (there are one or two, depending on the type of battery) the costs per battery are extremely low and the effort involved to recondition an old battery very low indeed.

It is important to realize the unhealthy (if not dead) condition of a battery can be due to its charger which frequently malfunctions. But, much more frequently, it is the battery which is murdering the charger.  It’s common to find people replacing a perfectly good charger, only to find the real culprit - the battery. Once a battery's 'natural' lifespan has been exhausted it must be properly reconditioned in order for it not to be a threat to equipment and chargers.

To recondition old batteries follow these specific steps. This inexpensive plan can recondition old used car batteries, which seem dead, to an almost new condition.

Things You Will Need:

Safety goggles

Distilled water

Epsom salts

Three-phase charger

Drill

Nonmetallic container

Wrench

Rubber gloves

Read the rest at:  http://www.poormansurvival.com/Pages/guestcolumn.aspx

The DIY Solar Charger

Keep your gadgets powered even when the grid fails you

It's a dark and stormy night–too dark. Your home has lost power. Fortunately, you've got a fully charged power plant, built from an inexpensive solar panel and a rechargeable battery. Eight hours of sun will produce enough juice to watch An Inconvenient Truthtwice–on a portable DVD player. You can even find inverters that will turn the station into an AC outlet. Add additional panels and batteries, and you could power the margarita machine and the flat-panel too.

Build a Solar Power Station - for about $150
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2007-07/diy-solar-charger

Make a Greenhouse: Horticulturist Help

My husband is a horticulturist. He has developed a "solar" greenhouse design that is easy to build & cheaper than buying a greenhouse. Here in S.E. Idaho we can grow in it 10 months out of the year without added heat. Our weather gets to 20 below zero here and can freeze in July.

The solar greenhouse has superior insulate values and gets more light to your plants than a regular greenhouse. It can be attached to your home or free standing. If attached to your home, you can get free heat from the solar greenhouse for your home.

Read the rest here:

http://www.stretcher.com/stories/02/02jun03a.cfm?STT

I believe there are free plans on the net to build a greenhouse out of PVC pipe. You'll find a couple at www.snapclamp.com/greenhouse.htm and westsidegardener.com/howto/hoophouse.html

Bounce dryer sheets will chase ants away when you lay a sheet near them. It also repels
mice.

The Nanny State Updates…

TSA Security Theater. You take off your shoes so we can pretend something is being done to stop terrorists from taking dangerous things on planes, but of course, since shoe-removal is universal (in the U.S.), there is absolutely no reason to suspect that a terrorist will put something there. He will put it where the sun doesn't shine, and the first time they catch that we'll all be subject to rectal screening just to get on a plane. Then they'll sew it inside there pet dog and... well, you get the point. There is no way to stop all threats, and the things done are largely for show.

Steve Moore, a former FBI Special Agent and counter-terrorism specialist, says on his G-Man Blog;

"TSA has never, (and I invite them to prove me wrong), foiled a terrorist plot or stopped an attack on an airliner. Ever. They crow about weapons found and insinuate that this means they stopped terrorism. They claim that they can’t comment due to “national security” implications. In fact, if they had foiled a plot, criminal charges would have to be filed. Ever hear of terrorism charges being filed because of something found during a TSA screening? No, because it’s never happened. Trust me, if TSA had ever foiled a terrorist plot, they would buy full-page ads in every newspaper in the United States to prove their importance and increase their budget."

Moore was a pilot for the FBI, and his father, also a former FBI Agent, worked for United Airlines for many years as the manager of security. He goes on to detail the...

Continues here...
http://www.thesecretinformationsite.com/security-theater.html

Ammo Regulation – Killing Your Gun Rights Slowly
through Micromanagement

Ammo regulation comes in many forms:

"Sin taxes" on ammo, making it more expensive;

Controlling the kinds of ammo you can buy;

Controlling the types of clips you can own;

Controlling the supply of ammo and military-sourced spent brass;

Microstamping or putting an individual serial number on each bullet to raise the cost and burden for producing ammo;

Requiring you to register or submit to bureaucratic paperwork to buy ammo;

Using environmental policy to regulate ammo;

And dictating how and where you can buy ammo that increases the burden of gun ownership.

In effect, you can keep your guns, but they're going to make it as difficult as possible to obtain ammo

The Parting Thought – Trust No One!  

Who can you trust these days?

Do you trust the police, bankers, lawyers, politicians, priests, government agents, teachers?

It’s become increasingly rare to turn on the nightly news and not see a story about a crime committed by people we used to trust…pedophile priests, teachers having sex with students, politicians with their hand in the till, bureaucrats taking bribes and payoffs, crooked lawyers (well that isn’t new) and more.

In Seattle, police tasered a pregnant woman three times after she refused to sign a ticket for a traffic violation.

During an interview last year, trends researcher Gerald Celente made the following statement....

"Society is breaking down on every level: socially, economically, politically and it's not just the U.S. It's worldwide."

A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed barely 10 percent of the public trusts the government.  Trust in public institutions like corporations, banks, courts, the media and universities is at an all-time low; the military is one of the few exceptions.

In Tom Brokaw’s new book, The Time of Our Lives: A conversation about America, in which he talks about what's changed since the prosperity of the post-World War II era and the challenges America faces in the new millennium.

He said that much of the current loss of faith is that things people took for granted and put faith in turned out not to be true.

"The younger people who are coming out of college now ... have watched their parents lose jobs or get furloughed," he says. "That's led them to return home in many instances ... because they say, 'We can trust our parents, we don't trust corporations.'"

Should we all adopt the catch phrase of Agent Mulder from the X-Files - Trust No One?

 “Until the next revolution”, the Poor Man

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