Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
ISSN 2161-5543
In This Issue:
1.
Learn
how to make the most out of meals
2.
Unusual uses for Aspirin
3.
Now it’s Offloading, not Offshoring of US jobs
4.
Freelancers miscounted, shortchanged
5.
Buy foreign currency easily
“In
religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every
case gotten at second hand, and without examination.” — Mark Twain
Weathering the Storm(s) by stocking up before disaster
strikes
With every disaster, the nightly news is filled with clips of people
raiding their local store for food, water and batteries, often emptying shelves
within hours. It would seem many wait
until the last minute to stockpile emergency items. Why is that?
While more people are
starting to stock pile food in their homes,
the dollar has lost more than 500% of its
value since 2001, making food an ever more expensive commodity.
The potential for food
riots in the U.S. – and some experts have predicted they'll start occurring
before the end of 2012 – does not have to leave you hungry. Start preparing now
and you can weather the rising food prices and potential food shortages.
Build up your own food
storage system. Take the right approach, it's actually pretty easy and it
doesn't have to break the bank. Start by storing enough food for one month. At
a bare minimum, each person in your family needs 1200 calories a day... 1500
would be better.
During your next
grocery trip, begin buying extra shelf-stable foods that you can stock in your
pantry or your garage. My preference is for canned foods. The main reason is
that canned foods contain water, so if the water supply is disrupted or limited,
you'll still be able to eat from your food stores and the foods you're
eating will help to keep you hydrated.
Shelf life for foods of more than a year
include bouillon, instant cream, nuts, cereals, and hydrogenated (or
antioxidant treated) fats/vegetable oil. Vegetable oils last longer than lard
or similar products and are better for you health-wise. Olive oil lasts the
longest and may be used after several years if care is taken to keep it cool
and away from exposure to the light.
Unprocessed
grains give you the most nutritional calories for your money. And when they are
stored properly, they last almost forever. This makes them ideal for many
people who have the space to store them. At the time of this writing it is
possible to buy enough food to feed a family of four for one year (or more) for
just a couple thousand dollars (or less).
In
previous issues we’ve suggested stocking up on weekly staples that go on sale,
finding local grocery outlets such as Save-A-Lot, joining the popular warehouse
clubs and creating your own buying cooperatives with like-minded friends and
families. For very long term storage,
MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) are useful but not cheap. You can find similar items, including
freeze-dried foods at sporting goods stores where camping supplies are found
and online at specialty outlets and even on eBay (visit our PoorManSurvival.com
site to find these resources - click on the Preparedness tab). Another source: www.efoodsdirect.com
Better to be the ant than the grasshopper
of the old Aesop Fable fame!
Use chewing gum to patch a hose. Works well enough the hose will most likely
never leak again. Chew a stick of
sugarless gum and place it over the hole and flatten to fit tightly. Let it sit for a day or so. During WWII, soldiers fixed flats on jeeps
with this.
PM’s
Compendium of Useful Resources
Learn Techniques to Make the Most Out of Your Meals
Some cooking
techniques like braising and slow cooking are very cost-effective and simple,
producing flavorful meals; you can tenderize extremely tough—and
inexpensive—cuts of meat with these techniques.
Make the Most Out of Cheap Proteins
The biggest cost
savings you find may be on proteins, especially with today's rising meat
prices. If you're not a vegetarian, the meat portion of the meal could very
well make up the majority of your grocery budget (thus, it also follows that
you can make the most out of your food budget by switching to a flexitarian diet or just eating a meat-less meal every once in a
while).
Learning a few cooking
techniques to enhance even cheap cuts of meat can help you turn a $5 steak into
a $50 steak, so to speak:
Find the best rebates at:
RebatePlace.com or PriceGrabber.com or SalesCircular.com
Aspirin - the
wonder herb
The bark of the willow
tree is rich in salicin, a natural painkiller and fever reducer and in the 3rd
century, Hippocrates used it to relieve pain.
Felix Hoffmann, a chemist from the German firm, Bayer, developed a
modified derivative of it which became known as aspirin. Native Americans used herbs containing
salicin to treat colds and flue. It’s
truly a wonder drug.
A few unusual
uses for aspirin:
>Revive a dead car
battery by dropping two tablets into the battery itself. The acid will combine with the battery’s
sulfuric acid to produce one last charge.
>Some gardeners
grind it up to use as a rooting agent, or they mix it with water to treat
fungus conditions - typical dosage would be one aspirin to one quart of
water. Also, drop a tablet into the water
of cut flowers to prolong their fresh look.
>Clear pimples by
crushing an aspirin with some water and apply to the pimple and let it sit for
a minute or so before washing off with soap and water. Repeat if needed.
>Soften hard
calluses on feet by grinding six tablets into a powder. Add a ½ tsp. of lemon juice and one of water,
then apply the mixture to the affected area and wrap in a warm towel and cover
with a plastic bag. Stay off your feet
for ten minutes, remove the wraps and file the callus with a pumice stone.
Shop Online with Virtual Credit Card Numbers
Disposable everything
- disposable credit card numbers. It's hard to track someone using a different number
every time, and it's even harder to steal their identity. If you're concerned
about the safety of an online retailer but are willing to take the risk,
virtual credit card numbers (or single-use numbers, as they're sometimes
called) can help you isolate transactions and easily prevent fraudulent
activity. Not every bank/card provider offers this service, but call and see if
yours does. It can be really helpful when you need it.
You can even
get disposable email addresses through Yahoo.com
Buy Foreign
Currencies Easily
This is not an ad for
Everbank (everbank.com), but I thought you should know that it is easier than
ever to invest in a foreign currency. So if you are worried about the
destruction of the U.S. Dollar, check out their options. They have FDIC-insured
CDs in a variety of currencies. Of course the FDIC insurance covers the even of
a bank failure, and does not protect you against the fluctuations in value, so
you definitely can lose money if the dollar rises against the currency you put
your money into. At the moment, I like the Brazilian Real, which has done well
against the dollar this year.
Source: Steve
If you’re a coupon
clipper, clip some for pet food, toys and treats and donate them to your local animal
shelter.
The Nanny
State Updates…
The Fed already holds more than $1 trillion dollars of U.S. treasuries - that's more than 70% of all outstanding debt - making it the largest lender to the U.S. in the world.
"The U.S.
government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days
when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally
gone," China's official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary.
Xinhua scorned
the United States for a "debt addiction" and "short
sighted" political wrangling. China, it said, "has every right now to
demand the United States address its structural debt problems and ensure the
safety of China's dollar assets."
FREELANCERS UNION SAYS INDIE WORKERS MISCOUNTED,
SHORTCHANGED
For many years now,
the (U.S.) government has underestimated independent workers and their
importance to the economy, many experts agree. The Bureau of Labor Statistics,
the SBA and others charged with measuring businesses and workers have fallen
behind rapid changes wrought primarily by the Internet.
For example, as a recent Businessweek piece notes, even “[t]he number of so-called contingent workers hasn’t been measured since 2005, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics last calculated the population.”
Sara Horowitz, whose Freelancers Union numbers 160,000, wants more accurate definitions and measuring of contingent workers. She also makes the excellent point that health and unemployment insurance should cover independent workers, too.
As we often preach here, the U.S. economy needs to emphasize entrepreneurship at LEAST as much as it does jobs. (Middle-class jobs are disappearing!) If we don’t, the global economy will leave us behind the way we once left it behind. Counting indies accurately and supporting their critical role are important steps in that direction.
For more, see the Businessweek article and the Freelancers Union website.
For example, as a recent Businessweek piece notes, even “[t]he number of so-called contingent workers hasn’t been measured since 2005, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics last calculated the population.”
Sara Horowitz, whose Freelancers Union numbers 160,000, wants more accurate definitions and measuring of contingent workers. She also makes the excellent point that health and unemployment insurance should cover independent workers, too.
As we often preach here, the U.S. economy needs to emphasize entrepreneurship at LEAST as much as it does jobs. (Middle-class jobs are disappearing!) If we don’t, the global economy will leave us behind the way we once left it behind. Counting indies accurately and supporting their critical role are important steps in that direction.
For more, see the Businessweek article and the Freelancers Union website.
Public services are
staggering under the weight of 43 million hungry dependents now on food stamps,
millions more exhausting their unemployment checks in addition to the
masses who are foolishly relying on bankrupt public retirement programs and
medical services to be there for them. With government finances teetering on
the brink at all levels, it all adds up to mega-potential for civil rebellion
from the dependent class.
Use lip balm to fix a stuck zipper by rubbing it up and down the teeth
of the zipper and then work it in with your fingers.
The
Parting Thought - Offloading US jobs, the new trend
DejaView: Recession II with no end in
sight…
A smaller
share of men have jobs today than at any time since World War II
As President Barack
Obama puts together a new jobs plan to be revealed shortly after Labor Day, he
is up against a powerful force, long in the making, that has gone virtually
unnoticed in the debate over how to put people back to work: Employers are
increasingly giving up on the American man.
If that sounds bleak,
it's because it is. The portion of men who work and their median wages have
been eroding since the early 1970s. For decades the impact of this fact was
softened in many families by the increasing number of women who went to work
and took up the slack. More recently, the housing bubble helped to mask it by
boosting the male-dominated construction trades, which employed millions. When
real estate ultimately crashed, so did the prospects for many men. The portion
of men holding a job—any job, full- or part-time—fell to 63.5 percent in
July—hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in
December 2009.
These are the lowest
numbers in statistics going back to 1948. Among the critical category of prime
working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely
noticeable improvement from its low point last year—and still well below the
depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never
dropped below 85 percent. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in
1969, 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.
While off shoring of
US jobs has been a major contributing factor to job loss, another factor is now
in place, that of offloading - cutting jobs while dumping the work onto
the remaining staff. According to a
report in the Wall Street Journal, more than half of all workers surveyed said
their job responsibilities and hours have expanded, usually without a raise or
bonus.
US productivity
increased in 2008, 2009, and again in 2010 - workforce down, productivity and
profits up (by 22% since 2007). What’s
been good for corporate America, has not been good for workers. Everyone is working harder, running in place
twice as much but without the rewards.
Predatory corporations also pay less taxes than 20 years ago. Is it any wonder why this country is in
trouble?
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