Dustin Rhodes

Maybe finding someway to quantify the benefit you're providing to the community?

Amount of city/county tax dollars not needing to be spent because your efforts, # of trash bags diverted from landfill, # of people/month who had a better day thanks to your services, etc.

Depending on what services you provide, you might even be able to apply for 501c3, accept food stamps, or receive a grant, and become "in-the-black" money-wise, without taking away from the good work you already do!

if they are LL Beans, they have a re-sole program you can do- it's not free, but it's cheaper than new boots.

you could try sewing them yourself with a heavy needle, waxed canvas thread - but the waterproofing will still be mostly gone.

An initial weed-whacking around the base of each tree will help with air flow too(don't clear it to bare dirt; just knock down standing weeds.)

Meal 1 - Scrambled Eggs. with whatever leftover piece of cheese, chopped up lunch meat you have on hand. add green onion or mushrooms for easy vegetable. mix all into the beaten eggs before cooking.

Meal 2 - chop up any vegetables (and I mean ANY Vegetable) into rough chunks(even easier if you pick vegetables that don't need to be peeled.) sprinkle with oil, butter, or schmaltz; salt and pepper. Roast everything on a sheetpan in the oven; 415 F for 45 min, stirring once halfway through cooktime.  
Not as fast, but the prep is fast and easy, no mental fatigue of thinking through recipes, instructions, timing & steps, etc.

Meal 3 - Grilled cheese or quesadilla with ANY type of leftover meat inside(pork chop, meatloaf, chicken thigh, steak, pot roast, etc.)

Melissa Ferrin wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:

Melissa said, "How is this different than green beans?

Do some people eat pinto beans with the shell?

Yes, I guess, maybe picking them a bit earlier than you do. The beans for dry beans they don't pick until they are completely and totally dry on the vine. The whole vines are picked and then the beans are harvested via them being heavier than the dry vines/shells.

This ^

When the beans are harvested dry, it's a lot less work to shell them. it's closer to "winnowing" - crushing large batches of pods and letting the heavy beans fall while the papery dry pods "blow away," rather than individually shelling each pod.

Total # of decks requested(by my crude count) on this thread as of 3/15/22 2:45pm pst:

333 decks

That looks like we've surpassed the lowest price tier requirement from the original post; sounds worthwhile.


Or maybe you're expecting half of these folks to change their mind if an actual preorder (involving money) was started?

I'd buy 4 decks of cards.

Hello,

I LOVE making lactofermented foods - sauerkraut, pickles, hot sauce, preserved lemon, olives, etc.  I use a recipes that, scientifically speaking, do truly preserve the food within them.

however, I usually store these in the fridge after I have made them, just to be safe/make other people eating them feel more safe, but; if I don't want to store these lactofermented veggies in the fridge, should I still can them, just to seal out the air?

Furthermore, If i do end up canning them: due to the lactic acid from the fermentation, these only need to be water bath canned, and not pressure canned - does that sound right?

YES - use the pork fat! It will take some experimentation for you as far as what ratio to venison you end up preferring, and maybe it won't like the grinder in the same way as the pork meat itself. But it's well worth it.

Michael Cox wrote:

Mark Reed wrote:It takes a given amount of energy to move a vehicle along its way. I can't figure out why it's better to produce it in a big powerplant to charge individual batteries than to have individual engines doing it.

Yes, that is exactly it. Large conventional power plants extract around 90% of the available energy as electric, compared to a car engine which would be lucky to extract 30% of the chemical energy as useful work. Both systems have other loses as well - producing and transporting petrol to pumps, EVs running power through cables. EV wins on efficiency by a considerable margin.

Plus, from what I understand there is a lot of extra issues that go along with manufacturing the batteries.

Some of these are real, most are massively overblown. Technology is evolving rapidly to make these issues go away, because those issues are also where a lot of the expense is. Manufacturers are highly motivated to make batteries cheaper, which in practice means finding alternatives to the expensive and problematic rare minerals.

Does an electric vehicle somehow need less energy to push itself along than a diesel vehicle does?

Yes - much more of the available energy goes directly to driving the motor, rather than being wasted in heat etc…

Does building a battery have a smaller impact than building an engine?

Sort of. If you lift the hood of a conventional car there is a huge complex engine full of moving parts. The equivalent engine of the EV is much smaller and simpler, with fewer moving parts. They basically don’t wear out so the lifetime cost of the engine is much less than for a conventional engine.

The battery tech itself is now largely recyclable.

Because, if not it seems to me that batteries might be even worse than engines

This analysis has been done to death by manufacturers, governments, independent environmental organisations etc… you can certainly point to individual aspects of the system that are not great (eg current use of small amounts of rare metals in batteries) but on balance the system is undoubtedly better than the conventional engines.

On top of all of the above, EVs allow the transport sector to be powered by the renewable entertainment sector. If we want carbon neutral or carbon negative economies we emphatically need this to happen. The alternative of a decade or so ago - biofuels - was an environmental and human disaster. Subsidies for biofuels drove deforestation, reduced crop area for available for food growing, drove up food prices globally (impacting the poorest people most heavily), and was actually still heavily carbon dependent as the crops used lots of fossil fuels in production (tractors, fertilisers, processing etc…).

The bottom line is that if we agree we need to have a carbon free transport system, then we need this, regardless of any harms. And the harms that get pointed to tend to be massively overblown.

This is the most coherent, simplified, and convincing argument for electric vehicles I have heard, and it's the first time I've heard it without condescension and negativity toward the sceptical listener.

Great Job Michael, in your explanation and, if the warrants you used are true and sustainable long-term(provided they someday find a solution to the rare metals issue, and the battery recycling remains profitable, this is great news for the environment and the world.