Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
For Independent Minded People!
ISSN
2161-5543
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to
the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those
dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and
less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy”
From The
Smiling Dog Saloon Files
In
This Issue:
1.
New-PayPal alternative and it’s free
2.
DIY Antiseptic ointment, Smokeless firepit
3.
More free ebook downloads-Getting Started in
Home Canning
4.
Privacy is theft (Orwellian
government-speak)- Updated Privacy Resources
Happy Halloween!
Starting last Tuesday, you can just email cash, free of charge, directly from your debit card to anyone else's, regardless of what bank each party uses. There's no login or password to remember and no special software or hardware required—you just use email. It works on both ends using any email service or program on any email-capable device, whether a computer, a smartphone or a tablet.
This new service, called Square Cash, comes from Square Inc., best known for equipping small brick-and-mortar merchants with smartphone-swiping devices that allow them to accept credit cards, and with tablets that act as sophisticated cash registers.
Square Cash permits you to send up to $2,500 a week in several transactions or all at once. At launch, it works only in the U.S., and with debit cards carrying either the Visa . It isn't meant for buying things from merchants, online or off, only for person-to-person cash transfers.
There are other services that allow you to send money from one person to another digitally. You can do it via PayPal, or via a newer service called Venmo, which PayPal is in the process of acquiring. But I believe Square is simpler and more private. For instance, PayPal places received money in a PayPal account and you must transfer it to your bank in a separate step. Venmo has a strong social component that encourages users to post when payments are made.
PayPal, which is owned by eBay and accounts for 25% of its annual revenues, rakes in billions of dollars annually. Setting up a PayPal account is time-consuming and vendors complain that chargebacks from customers are difficult to win (if the transaction doesn’t involve eBay however, your odds of winning a dispute are near zero), endangering what are already cash-flow starved businesses and your transactions are not anonymous.
The un-Patriot Act drove nail into the coffin for any financial privacy when using pre-paid debit cards or PayPal transactions as your Social Security number (in violation of the Privacy Act of 1974) is now required by the government.
PayPal can be a pain and expensive to use so
this alternative might prove useful…
PM’s
Roundup of Useful Resources…
Again, good reasons to store various essential oils and
coconut oil as there are so many uses, including as an antiseptic: “Today I am
going to share with you how to make an all-natural first-aid antiseptic that
you can easily make at home. This homemade antiseptic has excellent
antibacterial properties to treat everyday cuts, scrapes…
Raising Quick Cash
Most of us have faced a cash crunch at one time or another where a couple of big unexpected bills can wipe out your savings and even max out your credit cards. But there are ways to solve a cash crisis. Hopefully, with these tips and suggestions, your cash crunch will be short-lived and you'll have your finances in better shape quickly. Read more.
This is a good fire design to know, especially for bug
outs and other stealthy uses (link includes a video tutorial) because the
design helps to hide the view of flames: “Today we’ll be covering how to create
a Dakota Smokeless Fire Pit. These smokeless fire pits are great for hiding
your fire from enemies.…
Continue reading How
To Make A Dakota Smokeless Fire Pit (link)
FREE Downloads – Getting Your Household in
Order+Canning, Preserving, Pickling and Jams ebooks
From the Poor Man Survival crew…
This is an update to a piece we ran two years ago…even
more uses.
To be honest, I’ve never used
WD-40 for anything other than it’s intended usage: to loosen things up. Like
many supplies you should have on-hand, however, WD-40 can potentially do so
much more: “You might not have ever thought that WD-40 could be used for more
than loosening up rusty parts or greasing up your…
Storing
crops in a passively cooled basement root cellar is one of the most efficient
ways to preserve food year-round.
More...
More...
The Nanny State-We love our government
Weapons of Moral Hypocrisy
One country has a chemical weapons stockpile
that's three times as large as another country, yet denounces the latter
country for having any at all. Which countries are these? They are the United
States and Syria, respectively. Politics as usual includes hypocritical
pronouncements of "moral" outrage.
Camp
FEMA: American Lockdown
In a country born out of
political dissent, we watch our leaders in Washington slowly pass bills that
label ordinary Americans as thought criminals and potential domestic terrorists
for simply questioning the actions of their government. We see third party
candidates and their impassioned supporters listed in secret government reports
that call their allegiance into question and brand them as fanatics and
extremists.
The
Parting Thought – Nothing to worry in the land of the free!
Privacy is
Theft – Orwellian Speak for the US Government’s War on Personal Privacy
Our government, which should be taking the lead in protecting us from this free fall into the dystopian territory that Orwell so chillingly described in his book 1984, actually takes the opposite tack, embracing new invasive technologies with gusto.
For example, a creative hacker recently revealed that New York City routinely monitors the movements of drivers by means of the RFID chip in each E-ZPass toll unit. The hacker modified his E-ZPass to light up and make a sound each time it was read, and he was shocked to discover that it was accessed repeatedly over the course of a short drive through Manhattan.
The New York system, called Midtown in Motion, includes 100 microwave sensors, 32 traffic video cameras and E-ZPass readers at 23 intersections to measure traffic volumes, congestion and to record vehicle travel times. It was introduced quietly in 2011, without advance notice to E-ZPass users, and no mention of it in the product’s terms of use.
Other governments, too, have modified ostensibly benign technologies for monitoring purposes, in the name of building “Smart Cities.” London, the capital of Orwell’s fictional mega-state Oceania, has created a surveillance-based congestion charge zone. London, of course, has long been notorious for its “Ring of Steel,” a surveillance cordon of nearly half a million cameras and sentry booths at choke-points on the city’s access roads.
And lest we think that private enterprise is likely to act as a check on government’s totalitarian instincts, consider the emergence of an unsavory new industry: websites that collect and publish mug shots and charge a fee from $30 to $400 or more to remove the image. Mug shots, of course, are taken of all arrestees, regardless of whether they are eventually convicted of a crime. Once taken, they are in the public record and fair game, just as your E-ZPass movements seem to be.
The fact is that the world of privacy and individual liberty as we knew it has vanished altogether. The struggle facing us is no longer to prevent encroachments on our privacy, but rather to adopt ways and means to shield it from the modern information economy and surveillance state.
The Poor Man has
long recognized that privacy is the essence of liberty. Without privacy, our
ability to act freely is constrained by the foreknowledge that everything we do
will be watched and possibly judged. As Orwell predicted, in such an
environment, second-guessing one’s actions becomes second nature. We no longer
live as free individuals, but as extensions of Big Brother, whose will we try
to discern so as to avoid trouble.
"I Lived. I Died.
Now Mind Your Own Business." That's how I want my
tombstone to read.
New : How to Protect Your Privacy downloads
added-Free!
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