Monthly Archives: January 2026

Spot

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Many posts back, I mentioned that I usually only buy pm’s (precious metals) when I can get them at discount…usually at spot. So, here’s the interesting thing…I swing by my local PM guy the other day and silver is $107/oz. I ask him what he’s selling it at, in terms of premiums. Well, he’s selling silver, at that time, for $100/oz.

Waitasec…spot is $107 and youre selling it for $100? How…how do you do that?

Turns out the answer is…economics. My guy doesn’t want to get caught holding a bunch of metals in a market that is, to say the least, a bit volatile. He sells it to his wholesalers almost as soon as he gets it. Well, his wholesalers are buying it at $17 under spot. So his $107 ounce of sliver gets him…$90. So, he can either sell the silver for $90 an ounce to the wholesaler or he can sell it to someone like me who walks through the door for $100. Of course, he isn’t buying it at spot…he has to buy it below what his wholesalers will pay him. So he’s paying, for example, $18 under. Or, put another way, he can either sell his $82 ounce of silver for $83 to the wholesaler, or $100 to me. Well, would’n you sell it to the buyer who is paying more? So, he is selling silver at below spot and still making money.

In a perverse way, its kind of a good time to buy silver if you focus just on the ability to buy at or below spot.

He doesn’t think the run up in silver is done yet. Doesn’t matter to me , though… one of my goals at the moment is to start replenishing my silver hoard that I liquidated to finance the Beta Site.

FAKking around II

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M. just swung by my desk. Took two stitches to close up his wrist. He thanked me for the help and said he’d be more careful in the future.

I was going to say ‘Thats my mitzvah for the day’, but, technically, a mitzvah is done out of religious obligation. Since Im not religious, I can’t really have any religious obligation. But, I have my own moral compass and it says “Help that nice old man who is bleeding profusely”. So…good deed for the day. Chalk one up in my karma counter.

I think the total cost to me was something like $1.00 for the supplies and about five minutes of my time. Neither one is a high enough cost for me to withhold helping a coworker. Or even a stranger. (Under current circumstances.)

 

 

FAKking around

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Minding my own business, sitting at my desk doing some work. I notice a flurry of activity and a buncha people standing around in the other room. One walks quicklly to the corporate first aid kit on the wall and says that M. has cut himself. Hmmm. Those corporate first aid kits arent anything more than band aids and Motrin. Guess I’ll go take a look in case its something serious.

Turns out, ol’ M. was cutting up boxes and got a little careless with his boxcutter and opened a hole in his wrist that was a little deep and darn close to some parts you really don’t want to poke holes in. The handful of band aids from the corporate first aid kit were not going to do the job.

Went back to my desk, retrieved the Bag O’ Tricks, and pulled out the pads, gauze, and tape. Got M. patched up enough to get him to the Now Care where he will, Im guessing need one stitch..maybe two.

The lesson here is that you can’t rely on the company first aid kit for anything more serious than a stapler injury or paper cut. Any kit you put together and tote around should be set up to handle something a bit more grievous than what can be remedied with a bandaid. (Although the vast majority of ouchies you address will, in fact, probably just be bandaid issues.)

But even the best FAK is useless if it ain’t there when you need it. Even though it takes up a bit of space and weight in my bag, the Bag O’ Tricks always has the first aid kit in it. And it gets inspected and updated at least once a year.

Real Estate – Nuclear Bunker For Sale

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I love the idea of these, but the maintenannce is, no doubt, pretty intensive. On the other hand, you could just buy it and sell ‘subscriptions’ to it like those Vivos schemes. For what you’d pay for one of these, you could build an amazing, smaller place better suited for a small (or large) family.

Article – ILLICIT CANNABIS CULTIVATION OPERATION LEADS TO DISCOVERY OF UNDERGROUND BUNKER AND LARGE CACHE OF ILLEGAL FIREARMS

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Plus one point for bunker construction, minus several thousand points for it coming to the attention of the cops. The plate carrier with the “VILLAIN” ID patch is a nice touch.

 

In December 2025, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) Northern Division Canine Unit received information about a suspected illegal marijuana cultivation operation on a property in Anderson. After securing a search warrant, CHP Air Operations conducted an overflight of the area, further confirming the information received.

Following an approximate month-long investigation, members of the CHP Northern Division Warrant Service Team executed a search warrant at the property on January 20.

During the search, officers discovered an underground bunker accessible through a 100-foot-long culvert. The bunker was equipped with power, ventilation, a concrete floor with built-in drainage and the necessary supplies to cultivate marijuana.

In addition to the bunker, officers seized 13 firearms, four soft body armor vests, 30 high-capacity magazines, and approximately 10,000 rounds of ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds. Among the seized firearms were a sawed-off shotgun, three AR-15 style assault rifles, one with an obliterated serial number, and two firearms reported stolen in 2016 and 1978 respectively.

A few pictures of a cool looking bunker. No pictures of the actual alleged grow op.

The pictures that are available show a pretty interesting setup, complete with concrete floors and ductwork to the outside.

I guess the powers that be will destroy it and fill it in because it doesn’t have a building permit or something. Judging by the size, it looks like they buried a quonset hut. Looks like they did a pretty good job of it too.

Silver > $100/oz.

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Silver topped a hundred bucks an ounce today. I cannot explain why, but on some level this is terrifying me. It’s like watching lines form around the block at an ATM, or seeing canned goods flying off the shelf in a frenzy. Rightly or wrongly, some part of my brain equates a huge and fast run up in metals prices as some sort of harbinger of trouble.

I wonder if the sudden rush by people to sell their silver and take advantage of the record high (because crossing the $100 mark might be a ‘trigger event’ for some people) will temporarily push the price down, leading other people to think “this is the dip!”, buy in, and drive the price even higher.

However, guessing what the market will do has historically never been my strength, but even a broken calendar is right once a year.

Taking opportunities where I can

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Every workday I do a bank deposit for my employer. Conveniently, there’s an Albertson’s grocery near the bank, so after I do my deposit I do a fast run through the meat department at Albertson’s looking for remaindered meat discounts. Today was a good day:

Organic Angus 85/15 ground beef knocked down by 50%. That puts it to $4.99 per pound. And its already in convenient easy-to-stack one-pound vacuum-sealed bricks. Well, I guess I’ll take ’em all. Contacted a friend to see if they wanted me to pick some up for them, so I’ll be spreading the good fortune around a bit. Still gonna have about 30# to tuck away in the freezer.

I got a similar deal many years ago, but back then it was $1.50 per pound. But that was 15 years ago before inflation worked its magic. Because Im a numbers kinda guy, I price compared against CostCo.

CostCo has 88/12 at $5.79…about 13% more than the remaindered stuff from Albertson’s. But its in bulk and needs to be repackaged. So, yeah, worth the effort…IMHO.

Considering inflation and other economic uncertainty, its not a bad idea to take advantage of these sorts of opportunities when they arise.

Its a sad state of affairs where $5 a pound is considered a bargain for regular hamburger meat.

 

Norwegians told to prepare for wartime property seizures

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More news that could, by some folks, be interpreted as a sign something is coming….

Norway has issued thousands of letters to citizens warning that the army may have to seize their homes and vehicles if war breaks out with Russia.

Norwegian military officials said the letters were an advance warning to those with assets that may need to be requisitioned.

The requisition policy covers vehicles, boats, machinery and property, and around 13,500 “preparatory requisitions” were issued on Monday, valid for one year.

Another fine reason to try and keep as low a profile as possible. It doesn’t have to be a nuclear war for .gov to come by and seize your lawfully held private property. Sometimes poorly-prepared local governments will pull that stunt: 1, 2, 3

I’ve spent the last half hour trying to find it, but somewhere on the blog I had a post to an article about a sporting goods shop in NY being broken into by first responders who broke into it to take supplies that they felt they needed. Of course, it was perfectly justified by the local .gov.

Moral of the story is that what .gov (local or national) doesn’t know about your stockpile won’t hurt ’em.

Gradually and then all at once

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The brother of a coworker died last month and would I be interested in some gun stuff?

Thats how I get in trouble. But, I couldn’t say no. I won’t get into too many details about how many guns I got (cough*ten*cough), but the Beta Site now has a dedicated Marlin .45-70 (Pre-Rem) to keep around in case the bears decide that my place on the food chain needs reassessment. Or an elk decides to munch on the vegetable garden. I mean..y’know…once the place actually gets built.

(My usual bear-repellent, in longarms, is the PTR-91 with a mag full of soft-points.)

Lifestyle vs. lifeboat

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What exactly is the purpose of the Beta Site? Is it the next step in my life where I eschew living in town and move to an ‘off grid’ lifestyle of careful energy usage, wood chopping, always worrying about well pumps and water…or is it an ‘in case of emergency’ sort of ‘acceptable’ shelter that while not having ‘all the comforts of home’ does provide orders of magnitude of safety over being homeless?

In short, is it a lifestyle or a lifeboat? Well, kinda sorta both…but not at the same time.

At the moment, and for the immediate future, it’s a lifeboat. A secondary location to pick up and run to in case, for whatever reason, living where I live now becomes untenable. As a lifeboat, it doesn’t need to look like something out of ‘Country Living Magazine’. It just needs to keep me warm, fed, safe, and secure. That can look like just a glorified campsite, it can look like a tweaked out garden shed, it can look like a small trailer, that can look like…well…any weatherproof box with a roof and some accommodations.

But the end goal is for it to be more than that. The end goal is for it to be a comfortable, functional, ‘homey’ place where I can snowmobile in on Dec 1, turn on the lights, fire up the woodstove, put on some quiet Spotify Christmas music, put my feet up, and watch the snow fall outside without seeing another human being until Jan 1. Thats the idealized and romanticized version, of course. I’m fully aware that its going to take a good bit of time (and money, unfortunately) to get to that.

So lifeboat vs lifestyle…for the next year, maybe two, its definitely just a place that I can run off to if need be. It’ll have some very(!) basic features but it will still give me more options than if I didn’t have the place at all. And over the next year or two, it’ll morph into something more than just a ‘bare bones’ destination. The final goal is something that is on par, in terms of convenience and appointments, with where I live now…flush toilet, hot water, heat and lighting, etc, etc. all hidden away at the end of a road no one really wants to drive down.

My birthday is in the summer, so Im thinkng that at my next milestone birthday in 2027 I’d like to have the overwhelming majority of things done, if not entirely done. We’ll see how it goes.