Global Guerrillas

LINKS: August, 31 2011

Some items of interest:

• Biocurious is a biohackerspace opening in Sunnyvale. Local software, hardware, and bio labs that connect to a global, R&D effort via online networks. A neighborhood location where professionals (formally educated) and amateurs (in the best sense of the word) can work together on building new things and improving on old ones. Every RC should have one...
• Fake Facebook to harvest protestor identities in Syria.
• The systemic threat presented by an overnight, term collateral swap market.
• William Gibson on people and cities.
• Talk by Stephen Graham on Cities Under Siege. Simply: an overview of military efforts to build systems that pervasively monitor all urban inhabitants. Seen as a way to control "feral" cities at a distance. This is the seed for how modern city states will be controlled in a neo-feudal system (after capitalism's crisis causes modern nation-states to disintegrate).
• Cities as operating systems.
• Lanier on the future. "What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do..." NOTE: I'm not a fan of Lanier's thinking. Not sure why he gets as much play as he does.
• English translation of a Bundeswehr report on peak oil. (PDF)
• How solar can follow Moore's Law.
• United States food insecurity

JOURNAL: Where Should I Put My Money Before Things Collapse?

Lots of very smart and very wealthy people are asking me where they should put their money.  The friend that asked me last night though that the traditional alternatives like Swiss Francs and Gold felt sooo 1970's and wondered what else is out there.  

Here's my answer:  

The SFr and gold are definitely a 1970's approach. The problem with this crisis, as opposed to previous ones that we have direct experience with, is that it is systemic/global.  It is a crisis of Capitalism itself, and therefore not confined to any subset of badly managed countries.  

Everything traditional will take a hit. So, it's not a question of shifting financial asset classes anymore.

The only asset class worth considering: A social investment in economically viable communities, whether local/production oriented or virtual/design-info oriented.

When thinking about this, don't think Facebook or a surburban bedroom communtiies. This about communities that can be, or be a part of, viable economic ecosystems.  They produce things.  

Why are they valuable?  When everything else is tanking, these systems will persist.  Further, these systems are likely to lead us out of this crisis, and they have the potential to grow quickly once competitors are swept away.

It's likely, given the advent and success of virtual currency systems like Bitcoin (which, as a proof of concept, shows that any economic ecosystem can launch virtual currencies that survive in the wild), that these new economic communities won't treat the traditional financial asset classes and currencies very favorably.  It's too easy to replace them.  Some may shun them entirely.

NOTE1:  Looking for a safe asset class today, is like a Soviet bureaucrat in 1989, sensing trouble ahead, looking for the directorate with the safest job.  

For techies, this means it's much better to be fully invested in microprocessors (the more advanced system) when every vacuum tube (the older inefficient system) in the world melts down due to a flaw in design/implementation.

NOTE2: Where am I putting my own money?  Into MiiU.  With MiiU, we're trying to create a store/clearninghouse of information needed to create these economically viable communities.  For example: we just signed on a permaculture curator and more experts will follow.  Our ambition is that MiiU will eventually be seen as a platform for these new communities to leverage (as things get worse).  So, if you are looking for a place to dip your toe in the water on this concept, we could probably help you with that.

LINKS: August 30, 2011

Some items of interest:

• The Fed's Secret Liquidity Lines. Corruption graphed.
• Italian town mints its own currency .
• Cryptico.js "easy-to-use JavaScript library for encrypting text on the client-side. Supports for RSA + AES methods and the text can be encrypted with any given bit length (228, 1024, etc.)."
• The Floating University
• Unpaid extortion bill catalyst for Mexican casino fire.
• Why a distributed energy grid will have to be built from the ground up.
• Chicago area gangs learn the advantages of an ecosystem. Traditional gang membership is going away in favor of syndicates (made up of members of many different gangs) that are focused on a specific business objective. These syndicates can assemble and disassemble quickly. In Iraq, this type of model allowed for the quick assembly of IED teams that assembled for an attack or short series of attacks and then disbanded. In Nigeria this model is used to assemble groups for political intimidation.

LINKS: August 29, 2011

Some items of interest:

• Autonomous drug delivery.

• Leibowitz Society. Information collection for collapse.

• More big Army vs. special ops talk.

• Open source imagery in Somalia.

• Geoffrey West: "With each increase in size, cities get a value-added of 15 percent."

JOURNAL: Open Source Education

A couple of years back I asked (in the article "Industrial Education" which is worth a read): 

"An Ivy League Education for less than $20 a month.  Why not?"

At the time there were only a smattering of course materials online.  That's changing.  It's coming.  Here's an example of a class that signed up 56,000 people in two weeks.

Another example of a highly scalable education product: Codecademy

The way to repair and revitalize modern civilization is on the horizon.  It follows a simple dictum:

Localize production.  Virtualize everything else. 

With the above, we see the virtualization of formal education (books were the first wave). 

Some other thoughts on this:

• It can drop costs by 3 orders of magnitude.  $20 a year instead of $20,000.
• It means that the best instructors teach almost everyone.  Why not the best?

LINKS: August 26, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• MiiU's hurricane preparedness page. Please add any tips or supplies or links needed. 
• Chad's exploration of how to live with unstable supply chains. He calls it RECESS - resource.exhaustion.crisis.evacuation.safety.shelter.  
• 3D milling machine made from Legos. 
• LifeNet. Ad-hoc mesh networking via software download to smart phone/laptop.
• Backpack Farm is designed as an all-in-one canvas backpack packaged with all the essential agriculture inputs needed for small landholders to standardize both the quality and quantity of agriculture production during an annual growing season, to mirror semi-commercial rates of production. Complete with 5 step program.
• insideAR 2011. Augmented reality conference in Germany. 
• Paper: "Decentralize, adapt and cooperate." Borrows heavily from GG thinking. "...many of our security systems — those that are resistant to change, or that try to eliminate all risk — are doomed."
• The Baltimore Food Policy Initiative is compiling a list of urban farming training program manuals from across the country, and is looking for manuals that accompany programs that run a minimum of 6-8 weeks. (Email Shlok if you have a contribution.)
• Some sort of seminar on "what your corporation can learn from criminal businesses." 
• Ran Prieur: Imagine a strategy game or RPG, where the weaker you are, the easier it is to rise, and the stronger you are, the easier it is to fall. The game is shaped like a bowl and drives you to the middle. This would be the opposite of almost all the [JR: real life economic] games we have now, which drive you off the edges, either so weak that you lose, or so strong that you get bored. 
• Mercs. vs. Pirates.

What Is Your Pitchfork Factor?

Reminder:  I'm @johnrobb on twitter if you want to listen in on my daily thinking.
___________________ 

The global economy is in the process of falling apart.  A decade + of global economic depression, political instability, and extreme social transformation has nudged its nose above the horizon.  

With this in mind, here's a question you should be asking yourself:

What is my pitchfork factor?

A pitchfork factor is a measurement of how vulnerable you are during this decade plus of turmoil until things settle down again.  Pitchforks can arrive in a variety of forms:

• Siezure of assets and/or imprisonment.  From nationalization to a corrupted process (for the personal gain of those in local/regional government or connected to them).
• Criminal activity.  From gangs to mafias to militias.  All will be present and they will be larger and much more active than they are today.  
• Riots.  Destruction and/or looting.  More random and less likely than the above.

Here are some very simple rules that can reduce your pitchfork factor:

1. Invest in your community's viability.  The better the community does, the better it will protect you.  There is strength in numbers.  If the gulf between your personal sucess and that of the community's is too large or your community is too small, your factor will rise.
2. Establish a trust network.  People with whom you can conduct transactions with without recourse to legal entanglements (which will be corrupted).  Know who is in and outside of this group.  Transactions outside of this group are very risky.
3. Invest locally in productive assets (while you still can).  Productive local assets (particularly food, energy, and locally consumable products) are a source of income to both you/your family as well as the community even when things are terribly depressed.  Remote investments or piles of fungible assets (in a safe or in a safe deposit box) are a liability since they attract unwanted attention and are nearly impossible to protect (unless you are willing to dispense violence at a level/scale commensurate with a mafia/cartel/militia).  
4. Know someone in government that can help protect you and your community.  The more powerful and/or local the better.  Connections to people with titles/status in powerful organizations are useful as a means of intimidation (I've seen this in action, it works very well).
5. Stay in your native country (as in: don't think you can escape to a condo in xyz country if things get bad).  This crisis is global so it will be bad everywhere.  If you have ever been in a foreign country that is really going down the tubes, you already know that this is critical.  Not being a native makes you an instant target and whatever support network you think you have can vanish in an instant (I've seen this happen and it can occur very quickly).  
6. Local militias/defensive forces.  Even a ragtag group that can assemble to protect your neighborhood/town is useful in a pinch (seen this many times).  If you have the means, equip/train them and/or give them a place to assemble.
7. Working on some more rules.  Will add/edit later...

NOTE:  A well stocked/armed cabin is not a solution.  This situation will outlast you.  Solely relying on being personally well armed/proficient isn't that great of an answer since it will most likely result in you and your family going down in a blaze of "glory."

LINKS: August 25, 2011

Some items of interest:

• Guardian.  Hackerspaces are very similar 17th century English coffeehouses (which were important in launching the middle class as a temporarily dominant social group).  What new group are hackerspaces building?  
• Solar charger (one of the many chargers/portable batteries available for for cell phones) etc.  Great to have in earthquakes/hurricanes/etc.  
• Karachi.  Politics + Gangs + ethnic warfare.
• Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini is slamming the run up in the gold market: it's the new subprime bubble only worse.  It's leveraged 25-40x not just 5-10x.  It's just another example of the global market's central planning directorate in action.  Another massive/bad investment by those with all the decision making power.  It may also be a good indicator that gold is part and parcel of the old broken economy and not something that should be welcome in the new one we're building.
• Mayor Bloomberg said he may evac areas of NYC due to Irene. Told people to build "go-bags." Probably a good idea for folks up the east coast to prepare to do the same.  Here's how to build one.
• eBay of Science.  
• Bazar. Open source software for distributed markets. 
• Argentinian fighting alongside Libyan rebels. 
• Libyan rebels using a mini-drone. 
• Transition Colorado is having a local food week.
• BrightNeighbor is a software platform for communities.
• Buoyant foundations for amphibious architecture.
• Open Hardware Summit in NYC on Sept. 15. 

LINKS: August 24, 2011

Some items of interest:

• The house manor that deeeping the last financial collapse bought.  Eric "Magnetar Trade" Litowitz and his wife Jennifer spent a year (after the collapse he helped worsen) in Europe, shopping for things to add to the "manor."  Pretty paltry considering the price we all paid for it.
• I've been on a short trip to celebrate my 25th Wedding Anniversary.  Wow.  Time flies when you are having fun.  I'm back. - JR
• Sitting will kill you. A standing desk is a good alternative.
• MakerBot takes $10 million in V.C. 
• ClearEdge. $60,000 (subsidized) for 5-75 KW residential fuel cell (320 square feet). 
• Delaware State Troopers find a sophisticated hydroponic marijuana system.
• Ollie is an Arduino-based autonomous blimp.
• AR bitcoin treasure hunt, video below: 

LINKS: August 23, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• Squatters in Detroit.
• $500,000 to $750,000 worth of copper has been stolen from DOE sites in the past three years.
• Collaborative city mapping.
• Netduino based sprinkler automation system.
• If you're in the area, check out Rethinking LA. 
• softshelter gives refugees from disasters privacy within a shelter. 
• The Safe Haven State Project.
• Effect of today's earthquake on the east coast cell grid.

LINKS: August 22, 2011

Some items of interest:

• Leaking data that potentially links speculators to oil highs in 2008.
• Food prices and riots linked. 
• Salem women suffering from cancer has only source of income shutdown by the local government. 
• A look at why the Kindle can't be made in America. 
• Rent vs. Buy tool.
• 22 minute video on five examples of indigenous resilience.

LINKS: August 20, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• Status check on Brazil's specialized police units trying to supplant illicit drug governance in the favelas. Per an upcoming law, these units will be in place for 25 years. "Many communities previously relied on the drug gangs for services from water to wireless internet, and critics have pointed out that the state has been slow to replace them."
• 13 year old applies biomimicry to enhance solar efficiency.
• Ad-hoc counter sniper in Libya discusses his mindset.
• 28 strong flashmob robs a 7/11 in 60 seconds. 
• Ongoing BitCoin conference. BitCoin based prediction market.
• DoD spending on drones will probably be limited.
• Boeing testing a submarine drone. 

LINKS: August 19, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• Japanese permaculture blog has great pictures and write-ups.
• Code academy uses game mechanics and just-in-time learning to teach you programming basics.
• Podcasts (with summaries) about permaculture and related topics. 
• i-Tree. Free software uses Google satellite imagery to explain benefits of planting trees.
• Fluid Nexus. Mobile app transfers messages without the cell grid, through short-range networking and the movement of people. 
• The Debt Crisis in American Colleges. "As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings." 
• No Tech and Low Tech magazines.
• If you're on Reddit, jump over to the Resilient Communities subreddit.

LINKS: August 18, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• PodPonics. 320 square foot shipping container uses environmental control and hydroponics to produce an acre's worth of food. 
• MakerFaire is in NYC September 17 and 18. They're looking for makers to show their creations (deadline is the 20th). 
• Lister + GEK.  Nice.  Find a way to build/smuggle Listers.  I suspect the folks that build a Lister kit micro-factory in the US will have a pretty good business.  
• Village Base Station project. A 20watt, OpenBTS based, voice and low-bandwidth node. 
• Campfire electronics charger.
• Rule 34 by Charles Stross is set in a world with ubiquitious 3D fabrication. 
• Predictive software guiding police patrols.
• Exploration of DIY insulin and thyroxine. 

JOURNAL: Global Financial Cancer

A couple of years ago, I wrote that the underlying structure of the global financial system was a "bow-tie."  Here's what I said (it's worth going back and reading the entire article and this paper on bow-ties from John Doyle at Caltech):

If we look at this new global system from a distance, its architecture is something called a bow-tie. This is a universal control system architecture that underlies complex systems from the Internet to cell metabolism.

What is a Bow Tie?

The bow-tie is a very powerful approach to organizing a complex system (it's a system design that is used by controls engineers.)  Visually, it starts with complex inputs (the left side of the bow-tie), boils them down into simple build blocks (the knot), which then allows the construction of complex outputs (the right side of the bow-tie.  Here are a couple of examples of how a bow-tie works (it's pretty elegant):

In finance, we have lots of business on the left hand side of the bow, they produce profits that produce $$ at the bow, which can then be lent out/invested in new businesses/etc. on the right.  In metabolism, we eat lots of different foods (left) that are reduced to simple sugars/etc. by our body (the knot) which are then used to build complex body parts and power complex activities (right).  Finally, the Internet starts with Web sites/etc. built with code, that output is reduced to bits by the Internet protocol, which is then recombined into the ways you use this data on your desktop.

As you can see, the bow-tie provides lots of flexiblity.  You can have lots of different activities on the left hand side of the bow (input) and through a reduction to simple building block produce an almost unlimited number of outputs.

The Vulnerability of Bow-Ties

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the earlier article, bow-ties are vulnerable to organisms that attach themselves to the knot at their center (like the way cancer uses the body's metabolism system).  These organisms relentlessly use the bow-tie's knot to for selfish ends (rapid growth).  The end result is typically death for the system.  My suggestion was that the instability we were seeing in the financial system was an indication that it had been co-opted by a malicious, self-serving organism.

Of course, at the time there wasn't much data to support this systemic analysis.  That has been rectified with a new paper, The Network of Global Corporate Control by Vitali et. al. from ETH in Zurich.  This paper finds, through extensive network analysis, that a small group of tightly intertwined financial institutions control the bow of the global financial system.  It is in effect, the world's first super-organism.  147 trans-national companies that the global core that is owned by itself (3/4 of the ownership of firm's in this organism are owned by firms in the organism).  This organism is beyond governments.  If it is self serving (and this shouldn't be too hard to assume), it is the equivalent of a biological cancer that has metastasized.

_____

This concentration is at a minimum confirmation of central planning at the global level. Which, given the soviet bloc's experience, will lead to disaster.

LINKS: August 17, 2011

Some items of interest:

• Starting to build a portable generator page.  That Yamaha ultra portable unit looks amazing (I'm thinking about getting one given how transportable it is).  It's strange that nobody seems to have built a comprehensive overview of systems/methods for generators (let alone info on gasification, Lister engines, etc.).  
• Foraging on vacant lots.  The NYTimes dives in.
• New York Initiative."We are individuals organized towards achieving peacekeeping objectives and humanitarian missions."
• Samarai. Maple seed inspired drone. 
  
• Seasteading gets some press. 
• Maker grey market ecosystem in China. Note how the Shanzhai Rules are reminiscent of the standing orders of OSW.
• "Exploring Community Resilience" is a new report from Fiery Spirits. 

JOURNAL: Grey Market Fairs

As the US and Euro economies unwind and their middle classes fail, we are likely to see the rapid growth of massive "grey market fairs" develop outside most major cities.  These grey market fairs will likely be modled on Argentina's La Salada (it's huge with over 30,000 stalls).

This fair has been around since 1991, but saw his most significant expansion after the 2001 Argentina Debt Default, where Argentinean Peso devalued 400% and 5 presidents were overthrown in 15 days. At that point; Argentinean middle class saw the need to acquire clothing and other products at one fourth the price. The fair's yearly revenue grew from under 100,000 the early nineties to 15 billion in 2009 according to the official statistics institute INDEC.

Fairs as big as this will grow quickly as people sell many of the used consumer items from their current middle class lives.  As things worsen, it will be a great place to sell new DIY systems and fabricated prototypes -- or -- trade for parts/materials needed to build/fuel new things. 

Think about where the fair will be outside the city near you...  Lots of business opportunity there.

JOURNAL: Entrepreneurs and Open Source Hardware

One thing is for certain, as jobs continue to evaporate:  to make external income in the future, you will need to be entrepreneurial (that's the word that describes people that start new businesses).  For many, that will mean building ventures to produce local energy, food, and products/services.  For others, that means building new things (from simple DIY systems to complex 3D fabricated devices) that have potential in in the global marketplace.

The best way to succeed doing this, in an increasingly dire global economy, is to fully embrace the idea of open source hardware.  Here's what this means:

• Start and stay small.  The entire point of this is to: make an external income for you, your family, and the people that helped you build the product.  
• Don't become indebted.  Don't take capital from financiers.  Resilient entrepreneurship is not about layering on debt/leverage or growing to a size large enough to attract the attention of an increasingly corrupt economic, legal, and financial system that will crush you like a twig.
• Build a prototype as a proof of concept. Document how you did it using video.  Even better: put it all on a page in MiiU.  NOTE:  If you need money to prototype something that's interesting/useful to a large number of people, ask for donations to build it (ala kickstarter).  It's important to note that these are not really donations since you can reward the people that contribute with early versions of the product).  
• Release the plans/diagrams/videos for how to build the prototype for free (so it can be manufactured locally by those with the capacity for doing so).
• Host a community on-line for those who want to build it.  Use the community that develops around the prototype to build advanced/better versions of the device.
• Sell/trade/barter finished versions of a productized version of the device/item to those that can't build it themselves.
• Develop a reputation.  Do this successfully enough times and raising money for prototypes and selling finished versions will become easier and easier.  Note that reputation works in reverse too.

 

LINKS: August 16, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• Fiskar's splitting axe.  Boy, I wish I had this back when I used to do lots of wood splitting.  Very slick.  Any experience with this?
• Simple "Green Curtain"  Nice for keeping out summer heat (payback looks like it could be in days once established).  I have a deck I'm going to try this on next year.  NOTE:  looking for a replacement for the Morning Glory (it's a weed) that's recommended in the page.  Any ideas???
• GEK wood gasifier.  Fantastic resource.  Need to get this up on MiiU.  User pages and run reports.  They also sell kits that start at $1.29 a watt.  GEKs around the world:
• Small towns in Canada, facing extinction, innovate. Cooperative businesses, geothermal, and community-based new industry. 
• 15 minutes of exercise per day increases life expectancy by three years.
• Mobile app to find local food. 
• Salt Lake City leased urban farmland with the condition that resulting produce would be sold locally. Received bumper crop.
• Bay area cities are starting to enable home producers to sell what they grow or raise.
• Movies: Growing Cities is about urban farming across the U.S. Urban Roots focuses on Detroit's plight. 
• Resin from recycled PET bottles to detect radiation. Plates that sense irradiated food. 
• Swarmanoid. Hand-, foot-, and eye-bots that swarm on an objective. In this case, a book on a shelf in another room.

LINKS: August 15, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• Anaerobic Digester page.  Turns garden/table scraps/poop into fertilizer and methane gas.   Included a simple DIY project with a metal drum.  Looking for better DIY plans/videos/methods.  I once ran into a guy that used one of these in his LA apartment.  He use the fertilizer on his window gardens.  The system didn't stink up the place.  He had the philosophy:  waste nothing.  These systems are going to get lots better/slicker as we transition towards the resilent economy.
• Stikkime  Add stikki notes to your environment for your friends or the public using your smart phone.
• Precipitous.  A collapse in workers share of national income.  
• I'm working on a Home Generator page(s) for MiiU today.  Making some progress, but it's slow going.  Want to cover both the old ways (the current commercial products) and the new/old/DIY systems.
• PlantLab. Doubling the efficiency of photosynthesis by tightly controlling the growing space. They're building out a Plant OS with code for each type of plant. 
• Post-modern bunkers. 
• Vinay put up a page outlining the many facets of building out resilient communities.
• DIYLILCNC. "A set of plans for an inexpensive, fully functional 3-axis CNC mill that can be built by an individual with basic shop skills and tool access."
• Portland Oregon is working on revising zoning regulations regarding urban market farms.  Early debate indicates that the protection of traditional approaches to real-estate value (ornamental residences, noise/traffic abatement, etc.) is the priority.  Given the scale of the economic crisis that is already upon us, this approach is completely broken.  They should be focused on building a simple platform for accelerating a local food economy.  
• The Urban Farming Guys page on MiiU.  Urban farming/resilience experiment.
• How combined heat power (CHP) systems work.  The heat produced while generating power is used to heat water/buildings.  

LINKS: August 13, 2011

Some random items of interest:

• OODA loop.  Courtesy of Avinavcom.  Should probably have a page on Boyd too.
• Jon looks at FerFal's tips for surviving economic collapse based on his Argentinian experience.  We have our own Argentinian survival expert at MiiU.  We are hoping he will start to publish his insights.
• Jon also looks at the book, The Backyard Homestead.
• Sundog is working on a resilient Transporation page. We have two smart guys working on transportation right now.  Join them.
• BBC.  Philadelphia's flash mob curfew.  50 arrested last night.
• "Specialization is for insects."  Heinlein. 
• More augmented reality for your phone.  Projectors.  This will let you project info from your phone onto any surface.  You could also interact with it (i.e. virtual keyboard or buttons). 
• Rota 9 (9th Company).  Russian movie about the war in Afghanistan now on Netflix streaming. English subs.  Combo Platoon/Full Metal Jacket/etc.  

LINKS: August 12, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• Home made Bedazzler for $250 in parts (DIY plans and code available).  Basically, it is a non-lethal weapon that uses flashing lights to make people sea-sick.  From the archives.
• 7 Rules for Building a Front Yard Garden by Devin.  Here's the problem in a nutshell.  To make your home resilient, you need to make it productive.  A source of production rather than consumption.  It will not only allow you to become more independent, it will in the long run, radically increase the value of your property.  The difficulty is that many people are still stuck in the past.  They believe that homes should only be ornamental/decorative and will resist any improvements you make to improve your resilience (particuarly front yard gardens on small plots).  Here are some ideas on how to work around their opposition.
• Interesting interview (Margaret Levenstein) on how income specuation (driven by income concentration) led to the deindustrialization of Cleveland just before the first Depression.
• Riot Rebuild. Architects, handymen, construction companies come together in the face of riots. "Think of it as Guerrilla Gardening for the urban environment."
• National Ecological Observatory Network.  Goal is to"Systematically monitor the environment on a continental scale."  15,000 sensors, aerial mapping, and satellite imagery to supply data across 500 categories (air, stream, weather). Data will be "open and free."
• 3D Printing competition. Win cash for submitting the "most creative and innovative" CAD model. 10x10x10in limit. 
• Ultra-thin polymer medical sensors.  "These devices connect to skin without adhesives, are practically unnoticeable, and can even be attached via temporary tattoo."
• 20% of Iowa's electricity comes from wind. 

LINKS: August 11, 2011

Some random items of interest:

• Grant put up a generic first aid kit page.  If you have specific recipes for first aid kits, please put them up here.
• Ash found another resilient car: The Isuzu Rodeo.
• Skillshare is expanding.  Micro education.
• Some great/open DIY solar ideas.  Would love to see some of these xferred to MiiU.
• Permaculture.  This is a VERY important topic to resilience.  It's the way resilient communities will get much of the food they eat in the future since it replaces work/energy with smart system design.  We're going to set up a complete directory (as complete as we can make it) for plants and animal species that can be used in permaculture gardens.  If you can help, dive in.  MiiU's planning to fund some of it and get other funding for the rest.  If you think that is a good idea +1 this page (I'm using Google + as a way to run an informal poll).   Also, +1 any other pages you find useful there.  The more +1s in a given area, the easier it is to decide what we should work on next.
• Oklahoma.  Natural gas pipeline + bomb.
• How Non-Violence Protects the State.  Free e-book.  Interesting for those of you interested in insurgency.
• More on Anon vs. Facebook.  "We don't 'kill' the messenger. That's not our style."   Open source warfare theory specifically prohibits taking down communications networks.  Why?  It damages the ability of the insurgency to operate at a high tempo.  In contrast, Governments shut down communications networks when they are in trouble.  
• The indisputable end of the McMansion era by Coley Hudgins.
• Guerrilla phone charging tip from Syria.  OMAR MAQUAD: We got a problem with the batteries because our batteries are running out, and no electric to recharge your equipment. So, for phone calls, we create a new way. It's actually simple way to recharge your phone. We used to -- a glass of water with two batteries Duracell or something else. This already exists everywhere. We use it, keep the batteries in the water for one hour or 30 minutes. Then you put the USB adapters inside the water and start charge. That's how we charge the mobiles.  From PBS interview (worth watching).  
• Atlantic:  Can the Middle Class be Saved?  Great article.  Starts with Citigroup's Plutonomy report (the report has been ruthlessly removed from the Web by Citi's lawyers) -- wherein they show that, in the US, the middle class doesn't really exist.  In reality, there are only two groups, a small percentage of rich households (that drive all consumption and investment) and the rest (that live hand to mouth).  The last time this happened (in the 1920s) a global depression was the inevitable result
• Atlantic.  Housing crisis still haunting US.  

LINKS: August 10, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• Anonymous declares war on Facebook.  
• MiiU on Facebook:  Looking for a permaculture expert to build pages for plants/animals that can be used in permaculture gardens.
• Hilarious.  On the domestication of dogs and man.
• Suits vs. Spooks. Jeff Carr's cyberwarfare game that uses social networks as a battleground.  September 23/24 in Palo Alto.   
• NOTE:  Open source warfare is tech agnostic.  It's not Twitter or Facebook or Blackberry that makes it work, it's the method of warfare.
• For those of you interested in how global guerrilla warfare theory is being applied in the wild, here's a book for you:  Deep Green Resistance (by Derrick Jenson,  Aric McBay, and Lierre Keith). Here's a little on their ecowarfare strategy from their website, and some more on how they use open source warfare and systems disruption.  At this point, nearly every meaningful insurgency in the world is using OSW (open source warfare).  From some of the folks behind the London riots to al Qaeda's new "Open Source Jihad" to Lulzsec/etc. Fortunately for these groups, the US military and their consultants are mired in 20th Century counter-insurgency (COIN), fighting farmers/herders in global backwaters. 
• Vinay Gupta has put up 4.3 Gb of data/presentations/thinking on surviving state failure.  Some good STAR TIDES stuff in there.
• I've built a page on MiiU for the WASP (Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform) drone.  If anyone has more details on the electronics package/packaging, please add it or send it to me.
• Ancestral Health Conference.  Coincidentally, getting healthy is completely in alignment with resilience.
• PeoplePower. "An open-source platform for learning about nonviolent regime change."
• ShotSpotter. Network of microphones triangulates location of shots fired. 
• Papercrete. A construction material comprised of water and recycled paper.
• One attempt to dissect the internet's dependencies. 
• Solar Sinter. A solar-powered, fully automated 3D printer using sand as material:

BOOK: Disaster Utopias and Elite Panics

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit.

Why do Crowds Turn Deadly?

That's a good question.  Here's a partial answer that challenges conventional wisdom: most crowds that stampede, crushing people, do so when entering a venue.  Why?  One reason is that people are more likely to surge forward when they think they are about to be excluded from something.  The other more important reason is that most venues aren't designed for rapid entry.  Venue owners erect artificial barriers to entry for commercial reasons.  In contrast, most venues are designed to enable fast exits and offer multiple ways to leave (per the fire code, etc.).  

The lesson here is that people charged with controlling the crowd (for commercial or "security reasons") are actually the reason most people die during crowd "stampedes."

Do People Panic/Riot/Rampage During Disasters?  

The conventional wisdom is that people panic during disasters.  Worse, it's assumed that many people immediately become feral looters when disasters hit.  Widespread panic has become the government's worst nightmare.  The boogey man that is trotted out to explain why governments need to lie (in order to keep people from panicking) or why military intervention/curfews are necessary.

However, as with stampeding crowds, the conventional wisdom on this is wrong.  Rebecca shows in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, that people don't typically panic when they find themselves at the ground zero of a disaster (after the immediate danger is over).  Through the use of detailed research on a number of extreme disasters, she shows that in most cases people are very practical when confronting disaster.  Better yet, they are often more courteous and much more likely to help each other when things fall apart than they are normally.  They come together to survive.

In contrast to the people on the ground, she shows that the only people that actually do panic during disasters are the elites -- from those with wealth to those running the government's response (I'm not talking about the first responders actually on the ground doing good work).  They panic over the loss of control a disaster brings.  This often results in extreme actions that only serve to make things worse: from martial law authorized to use deadly force against looters (often just people trying to survive the situation) to arbitrarily hearding people into locations that aren't able to support large groups of people.  

What This Means

The lesson here is that during an extreme disaster, the people you may most need to fear are those in charge, particularly if their motives are focused on protecting elite interests put at risk by the disaster.  Rebecca has a caution for governments that don't align their actions with those of the people:  history shows that disasters can serve as the trigger for revolutions if handled with bad intent.

LINKS: August 9, 2011

Some items of interest:

• GLBSE.  A stock exchange for companies that want to raise money in bitcoins.  New virtual currencies are developing via baby steps.  Eventually there will be a currency or three that gets it right and goes globally viral (without legacy baggage we see with gold, dollars, etc. and with many new "killer" features).  Listed companies on GLBSE.
• Added a page on the Lifesaver bottle to MiiU.  The system that can convert nearly any water source into drinkable water.  Here's a little brother to the Lifesaver bottle:  The Bobble Bottle. Not nearly as robust.  Looks like a nicely packaged carbon filter system.  Anyone have any experience with the Bobble?
• London riots.  Lots of the activity going on in London is based on open source warfare precepts.  Much more going on here than a simple riot or looting.  It's a learning lab.  Communicating via BlackBerry instant-message technology that the police have struggled to monitor, as well as by social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, they repeatedly signaled fresh target areas to those caught up in the mayhem.  They coupled their grasp of digital technology with the ability to race through London’s clogged traffic on bicycles and mopeds, creating what amounted to flying squads that switched from one scene to another in the London districts of Hackney, Lewisham, Clapham, Peckham, Croydon, Woolwich and Enfield, among others — and even, late on Monday night, at least minor outbreaks in the mainly upscale neighborhood of Notting Hill and parts of Camden. NYTimes.  Facebook example: Riot page.  
• Here's a great list of recipes (via Shlok) for DIY cleaning products.  Very interesing insight into what actually is needed for different types of soaps (dishwasher, washing machine, bathroom detergent, etc.).  They should save you money by using simple, bulk discount ingrediants - and - reduce the number/amount of caustic chemicals your are exposed to in commercial products.
• Gold is being driven up by one simple idea:  that it's possible for fortunes "made" in the ponzi economy to survive the scheme's collapse.  I'm not so sure it will be that simple.
• Anti. Simple, mobile hacking app."We wanted to create a penetration testing tool for the masses." A wi-fi-scanning tool for finding open networks and showing all potential target devices on those networks. The app offers up a simple menu with commands to eavesdrop on local devices, or even “Attack.”

• Factor E Farm/Open Source Ecology need a Fabrication Manager and a few other roles filled.  Think of it as training for the future.
• New York City wants to stop urban foragers. “If people decide that they want to make their salads out of our plants, then we’re not going to have any chipmunks.” Interview with a leading forager here. 
• Excellent podcast from This American Life on Thugs. "New narcos rolled into town telling residents that they were there to liberate them. They promised that people would live in peace and tranquility. And so far, it's working."  Very GG.
• Russel recommends "The Long Twentieth Century" by Giovanni Arrighi as a framework for understanding the financial meltdown. Arrighi points to means of production having diminishing returns over time, leading to financialization. Financialization leads to meltdown.  Given we're at the cusp of just-in-place fabrication, this is an interesting perspective.
• Good pics of the London riots.

BIG QUESTION: Gold or Virtual Currencies?

As anticipated, we're on the brink of a global economic depression (again).  

There's a strong possibility that a long running global depression will lead to a reshuffling of the global economic and political landscape.  IF that happens, many of the fiat currencies we currently use will simply evaporate.

Given this backdrop, here's today's big question:

If the dollar and euro implode...

...will the next global currency be gold or networked virtual currencies (like bitcoin)?  

Until the new currency platform emerges, the safest hedge for the future is building, buying, or trading for anything that can produce food, energy, water, and products locally.  

LINKS: August 8, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• Live blog covering the London Riots (3rd night and spreading).  Each group appears to be about 150 strong.  They disperse quickly when challenged.  Reassemble quickly at a new location via SMS texting (Blackberry).   Locations of riots in London (see Google map)
• Developers are turning stalled construction sites into urban farms. 
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study shows that, on average, the cost of adding a PV system is usually made back in the sale of the home (it commands a premium to a house w/o it) in CA.  A home with energy, food, and water production = the only home worth purchasing.  
• $40,000 cottage made "out of modified cob known as Leichtlehmbau, a lightweight mixture of straw and clay."
• $150 DIY Greenhouse. 
• Eliminata is an upcoming dongle that 'smartly' interrupts the flow of electricity from your socket to your appliance. 
• At least 9,000 heat records were met/broken across the United States in July.
• DARPA's Cyber Fast Track for rapid defense tech prototyping. "Objective is to capture multiple small cyber projects with a focus on shorter time frames, low cost, and with the expectation of results demonstrated in less than 12 month periods." 
• Umair on why current market movement is a sign of perma-crisis in finance. 

JOURNAL: D2, The Second Global Economic Depression

D2 is shorthand for the second global economic depression.  It started formally in 2008, and despite a short respite over the last two years, it never left.  It was only delayed by massive amounts of government intervention.  It is now back in force.

D2, given the forces driving it, is going to last a decade or more.  Simple prepping might help a little but it's far from what is going to be required given its duration.  

This depression will fundamentally reorder the economic, political and social landscape.  When it ends, most of the global institutions and markets we see today will mere husks of what they are today.  

What will replace them?  That's up to you.  

 

BTW:  We're building MiiU, the resilience wiki, with the long failure in mind.  Join us. 

 

LINKS: August 5, 2011

Some items of interest: 

• $5 pushcart/backpack/overhead carrier for laborers. 
• Three arrested in California for producing and selling unpasteurized milk. 
• Russian village self defense. "Sagra has become a catchword for a spate of violence around the country in which people have banded together to defend themselves in the absence of police protection."
• The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science is very cool. 
• For example, their DIY Balloon Mapping Kit. Here are regulations. 
• "Too Much Finance?" (PDF) "Our results suggest that finance starts having a negative effect on output growth when credit to the private sector reaches 110 percent of GDP."
• More as we go.