The Joys of Country Living

I went to the tap and turned it on. All I heard was a sucking sound.

Oh-oh!

After Quicksilver had been picked up, I grabbed a couple of screwdrivers, a multimeter and a headlight and went looking.

The first thing I noticed was that the breaker was tripped.

The second thing I noticed was....

One of the capacitors in the well-pump specific junction box had disassembled itself, presumably due to rapid temperature rise inside of the case. There was also arcing damage to the 1/4" spade connector.

That is what we call in the trouble-shooting biz "A clue".

The new part is ordered and is expected Thursday.

Arcane question to the smoke-hose guys:

We paid for a 3/4 hp pump down in the hole. I suspect that the capacitors in the generic junction are sized for the 1/2 hp pump "everybody" installs.

The blown start capacitor is 70 MFD. The internet suggests that it should be 108 MFD-to-130MFD for a 3/4 hp motor on 240V. (Link  3/4 hp is about 0.56 kW)

The reason I ask is that my 4000 Watt generator will not start the pump. I SHOULD have enough juice to do it even with 3X in-rush but maybe not enough if the starting coils do not have enough off-set from the run coils.

Is there a major downside to installing a 108-130 MFD capacitor IF the well contractor actually installed a 1/2 hp motor rather than the paid-for 3/4 hp?

A short discussion on "Local Industry' post

The "cookie" business is a good illustration of a viable business in austere times.

1. It uses ubiquitous or local materials. One reason the Weimar Republic crashed and burned was because their industry could not buy foreign inputs to keep the equipment running.

2. Fixed costs make mass production more economical than having every household make their own. "What fixed costs?" you ask? A significant investment in fuel must be made to bring an oven or griddle up-to-heat. Once the griddle/oven is hot, additional "cookies" can be produced with minimal variable costs. In total, a production run of fifty "cookies" is much less costly than fifty production runs of a single cookie.

3. The product addresses a need near the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. People being driven from pillar-to-post are concerned about maintaining body temperature, access to oxygen, potable water and having sufficient calories of acceptable food MUCH more than they worry about status or self-actualization.

4. The process scales quickly and easily whether through more hours of production or additional apparatus. Increasing the production of an orchard of olive trees does not scale quickly. Increasing the production of Programmable Logic Controllers does not scale easily.

5. Excess production has inherent value. If nothing else, the owners of the business can profitably "eat" their losses.

Local industry during hard-times

In the book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives of North Koreans LINK, the author writes about one family who adapted to (yet another) drought-and-famine.

As you might guess from the title of this post, it was a unregistered business.

They made cookies.

One side of the business made cookies for the speculative market: Say twenty cookies a day. The other side of the business custom-made cookies.

What they called a "cookie" might more accurately be called an unleavened hoe-cake or a journey-cake. It was ground corn mixed with a bit of water and baked on a hot griddle with almost no shortening. When times were tightest they dusted the griddle with wood-ashes so the cookies did not stick.

The custom side of the "cookie" business operated in the following way. Customers would show up with a bag of corn still on the cob to grind to go into the cookies. The business owner had a hand-turned grinder. It was up to the customer to decide how finely to grind the corn and how much cob and husks to include with the grain when grinding.

Yes, you read that correctly. The poorest customers supplied most of the labor and they decided how much filler to add to the corn-meal to extend the cookies.

I don't recall if the book provided dimensions of the cookies but my mind's eye thinks they were about 6" across and a half-inch thick. The "speculative' cookies had no leavening and were heavy for their size. Without shortening (fat) they would be relatively low in calories for their weight.

The size and content of the speculative cookies and the number made each day floated a great deal based on the cost of ingredients, availability of fuel and the discretionary money of their clientele.

They might have somewhere between 350-and-440 Calories (220 CC volume at 50% grain @ 4 Calories/CC) which is comparable to two Pop-tarts and a third as many calories as a 12" Subway sandwich laced with Mayo and with a side of chips.

The book suggests that a factory of farm worker might only have a "cookie" for lunch. 

The custom-cookies might only be half corn-flour and consequently have 175-to-220 Calories per cookie. Starvation diet when working or shivering.

There is inflation and then there is INFLATION!!!

Inflation has been defined as "Too many dollars chasing too few goods (and/or services)"

Peter over at Bayou Renaissance Man shared the sad mathematics that inform us that we will face accelerating losses in buying power regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans hold the reins of power. The deficit spending is already baked into the cake and nobody is going to walk-it-back. Deficit spending injects dollars into the system and puts a thumb on the scale with regard to "Too many dollars..."

Too few goods...

It is far too easy to forget about the second half of the definition "...too few goods..."

A distinction between the nominal conservatives and the Progressives that is rarely mentioned except in passing is the effect that Progressive policies have on productivity.

(Let's put the question of "Do elections really matter?" to the side for the moment)*

Mark Nissen performed a study regarding throughput and the number-of-levels-of-approval. Every level of approval auto-calibrated to a 50% mortality rate of failures. One level of permitting only approved 50% of applicants. The failures were kicked-back with the message "some changes must be made". Two levels of permitting only approved 25% of applicants "until changes had been made" Three levels...12% were approved first pass through. Four levels...6%.

• OSHA
• EPA (multiple internal agencies that work at cross-purposes)
  
• Justice
• IRS
• Civil Rights
  
• Health Department
• Fire Codes
  
• Zoning....

And it is only getting worse. One of our country's premier technical Universities recently went through Woke indoctrination where faculty was threatened with dire consequences if they committed "dead-naming", that is, if they used the name on a student's Birth Certificate, transcripts and other legal documents if the student was in the process of "transitioning".

This math of multi-pass filtering does not comprehend the mindset-of-failure and intimidation that this environment creates. Most people will not take initiative when there is a 75% chance or greater that they are going to get trapped in the La Brea Tar-pits of Government Bureaucracy.

A simple premise

If we only had to worry about deficit spending, we might see prolonged periods of 20%-to-60% annual inflation which will be incredibly painful but survivable for most people.

If we have both deficit spending and continued attacks on productivity then we will have exponentially accelerating inflation and history will forget about the Wiemar Republic and the United States will be the butt of all the joke.

At least when people are productive, people can have their basic, biological needs met even if they are forced to use something other than the debauched currency to transact exchanges. If food and fuel are not produced it becomes biologically impossible to survive.

That is why it is critical to get conservative candidates elected. We can be resilient and strong as a community as long as the little-people who are consumed with envy are not allowed to cut our Achilles tendons with impunity.

*Personally I think elections do matter given the amount of resources Democrats sink into them. At least they matter in some places.

People who plant trees live in the future

This is my mid-afternoon coffee break.

We have a break in the weather. It is not raining. It is above freezing. Quicksilver is napping. It is a grand time to get some things done.

I cleared out a shelf in Mrs ERJ's refrigerator where I was storing seeds. Mrs ERJ is a saint. I moved them to containers to stratify them.

Next year will be a "big" year for seedlings because I was given permission to plant an acre of scrub-grass to trees at a location that I am not at liberty to disclose. The acre is very roughly one-hundred feet across (east-west) by four-hundred feet long (north-south) and slopes the long way. Soil at the top and bottom are good. Top-soil at mid-slope is eroded and thin.

The west side of the strip is already wooded.

The plan is to put hybrid-Chestnuts at the top (great drainage), Northern Red Oak (or similar) in the middle and Pecans and Black Walnuts at the bottom. Seedling hazelnuts along the exposed east edge along with seedling of diploid plums and seedlings of Chojuro Asian pear. I will blend the blocks so there are no crisp transitions.

Black Locust seedlings wedged in every here-and-there for nitrogen fixing.

Planting on a 10'-by-10' grid requires about 400 plants-per-acre.

Decorating with Christmas tinsel

 

How green are urban styles

 

Modern Urban dense-pack.

Suburbia. Units have a roof-area of approximately 2500 square-feet

1940s vintage. Roof areas of approximately 800 square-feet

Post Rust-belt

In very round numbers, the distance across the width of the image is approximately 1200 feet or almost 1/4 mile. 

Street view Modern Dense-pack

From the perspective of being able to grow food, Modern Dense-pack is almost zero. 

1940's vintage is severely limited by shade but they have about 1500 square-feet of usable back-yards and another 700 usable square-feet in front. Not enough space to grow gross calories but enough room to grow vitamins and keep a few chickens or meat rabbits.

Suburbia is better but the trend has been bigger buildings and smaller lots.

The big surprise are the raw possibilities of the post Rust-belt urban area.