Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s PowerBall for?

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$1.6 billion dollars is a lot of money. In fact, it is more than the gross domestic product of a dozen different countries. (To be fair, those countries are mostly small island nations that have virtually no real economy outside of tourism and offshore banking.)

The fact that I’m still here typing should tell you how well my foray into PowerBall-stoked billionaireism went. But..it’s so delightfully decadent to imagine what you could do with that kind of money. According to my very bad public school math, taking the lump sum would have dropped me to around $800m. Then, after I generously buy Uncle Sam a couple jet fighters with the ~40% tax hit, I’m down to around $560m. Now it becomes interesting. Assuming some investments that yield a mere 5%, I could, in theory, get $28m/year just in interest without touching the principal. That, my friends, comes down to $2.3m every month to simply screw around with. Or, if you really want to go nuts, thats about $76,000 to spend every day. Do better than 5% and, naturally, you have more to piss away….and never touch the principal.

First thing: new phone number.

After that, it’s gifts for those I love. Nothing fancy. Everyone gets their house paid off.

Then it’s time to indulge fantasies. I’d imagine that when you order enough of a particular gun the gun companies are more than happy to cater to your bizarre needs. As a result, the guys at Ruger, PTR, Smith & Wesson, and Stag Arms, are going to be busy for a while. Federal can just unhook the trailers in my yard..I’ll take it from there. The ammo can go in the garage next to my new armored vehicle collection. Try not ding my new helicopter.

After that, it’s time to go shopping for real estate. Perhaps a small county in South Dakota or Utah. Something on the order of several square miles. Remember that scene in Quigley Down Under when, after days of traveling by wagon, Quigley asks “When are we getting to Marston’s ranch?” and the hand replies “We’ve been on his land for the last three days.” Yeah, it’d be like that.

And then I quietly retire to my lair to enjoy my enormous gun collection, fabulous shooting range, amazingly secure house, and other toys. When I’m not busy manipulating politicians with briefcases of ‘campaign contributions’, or making the lives of people who have wronged me miserable, I’ll spread a little joy to the world…repair a few decrepit schools, sponsor some scholarships, finance some animal shelters, build a few public shooting ranges, that sort of thing.

Perhaps buy a small gun company. Or start one from scratch using the latest and greatest manufacturing technology. Build my own company town with factory, R&D center, employee housing, etc.

You can have a lot of fun, do a lot of good, and screw over a lot of people, on $76 grand a day. A permanent suite..heck, an entire top floor…at some Las Vegas high-end hotel would be nice.

Alas….fun to fantasize but the reality is with 1:292,000,00 odds it’s just daydreaming. But, it’s those happy little vacations from reality that make life bearable, eh?

 

Posted in Fun

Link – Survivor Library

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In the survivalist classic, Lucifers Hammer, a nerdy scientist realizes that the most valuable thing to save for the rebuilding of civilization will be knowledge. The information on how to build generators, grow food, treat injuries, prevent disease, build shelters, etc, etc,. To that end, he starts preserving all sorts of useful books and eventually he is proved right in his prediction of their utility.

Someone appears to have taken that idea and ran with it. A collection of .PDFs of various texts, going back quite a ways, on subjects that would be useful if you believe in the ‘we start over with 19th century technology’ scenarios.

I love reading this sort of stuff. While I have no intention of making penicillin from scratch, but I’d be interested in reading how it was done nonetheless.

Burner phones

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Before I throw my two cents in, here’s a few other articles worth reading:
4 Good Reasons To Get an Emergency Burner Phone
Sick of the NSA Tracking You? Burn Them with a Burner Phone
How NSA breakthrough may allow tracking of “burner” cell phones
Burner phone? There’s an app for that, and it’s earning millions of dollars

It’s not that I’m doing anything wrong, it’s just that I really value my privacy. Sometimes, you really don’t want some stranger knowing your ‘real’ phone number. For example, if you were posting a car for sale on Craigslist, you really don’t want people calling you at 2am for the next six months after the ad runs. Or getting the slew of robocalls and unsolicited sales calls that come with it. So..the solution is a disposable ‘burner’ phone.

These things are normally associated with criminal activities, and there is some merit to that, but if you think about it, it makes sense…who has the most to lose by having their privacy and relative anonymity compromised? People who are facing jail if they get caught. And since I’m the kind of guy who feels that who I communicate with is no ones business but me, I want to be able to keep my privacy and the best way to do that so far are those stupid ‘pay-as-you-go’ overpriced phones. But, hey, what’s your privacy worth?

So, first step, you go into a WalMart or other venue and buy a phone. At the moment, no ID is required to buy one of these things so your name isn’t attached to it. (Although I fully expect this to change pretty soon.) Pay cash..don’t be an idiot. Where’s the liability in this exchange? I suppose if The Powers That Be really want to, they could come into the WalMart (or wherever) and demand video surveillance of all purchases during a particular time frame. Lets say you buy your phone on February 1. You activate the phone on May 2. The feds track the phone by the manufacturer to the wholesaler to a particular store, and then they ask for the weeks worth of video prior to that activation. So..you can either shop where you don’t think there’ll be a video record, or, do your activation so far after the purchase date that the surveillance video is long overwritten. It might also be a good idea not to buy your phone at the store thats three blocks from where you live. Think about that.

Next up, you have to activate the phone. This usually requires you to call from another phone. Obviously you don’t want to use your own phone, nor do you want to get any of your friends involved, so you need an ‘arms reach’ phone. Fortunately many places (banks, hotels, etc.) have a phone sitting on their counter for customers to use. The same cautions about surveillance video apply. And, again, try to do it far from where you sleep. If someone wants to tie you to a particular phone number, it’s gonna look pretty bad if the activation call came from a bank four blocks from your house, and the phone was purchased at the Walmart five blocks from your house. Think.

Next up, you have to power up the phone. If you’re smart, you’ll never power this thing up anywhere near where you sleep. The idea is that if the phone sends signals to the towers, you don’t want that signal giving away your location. In short, charging up your phone by your bedside will compromise your privacy. If you really want to be cautious, buy a battery phone charger, charge the charger up at home (or get a disposable-battery-powered one), take it and your phone somewhere on the other side of town, plug the phone into your battery-powered charger, and hide it somewhere secure until its fully charged. After that, pop the battery out of the phone and only put the battery in when you are actually making/taking a call and when you are nowhere near anyplace you’d feel uncomfortable with people tracking your location to. In other words, don’t call from your bathroom.

Eventually, your time on the card expires. Renew it? You could, but realistically you’re better off, from a privacy standpoint, to toss it and start a new one. The longer you use the same phone, the more likely noticeable patterns will emerge and the people digging into the phone records will notice those patterns.

 

When you need a hard disk failure … on purpose

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This article ( The Right Way To Destroy An Old Hard Drive) got me thinking……

I’m a huge fan of privacy. And any sod that tells me that I don’t need crypto because ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide’ is a short-sighted statist who will be one of the first ones up against the wall when the revolution gets here.

Will snoop-proof cryptography and secure phones/computers make law enforcement and governments job more difficult? Absolutely. Is that a good enough reason to prevent it’s availability? Absolutely not. Yes, terrorists, murderers, kid diddlers, and all sorts of scum are going to use it. The fact that bad guys use it is not reason enough to keep me from using it.

By and large, I’m a pretty law-abiding guy..in the Heinlein way (“I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.“) But that doesn’t mean I feel anyone…spouses, government, church, my mom….should be able to just go spelunking through my hard drive when they have an itch.

Government is a shoddy creature when it comes to respecting your privacy, but it’s an Einstein-level genius when it comes to violating it. And thats why when you decide it’s time to upgrade your computer, it takes more than a simple wipe to make sure your German dungeon porn, Picard/Riker slash fiction, Katy Perry bootlegs, and .jpgs of that really, really, ill-advised waitress from Buffalo Wild Wings don’t wind up on someone elses computer.

Lots of people say that all you have to do is degausee your drive. Look, I’m not the trusting type. If I degause a drive how do I know it really worked? I’m not cracking my computer open, putting the degaussed drive back in , and then trying to read it. No..the best way is utter destruction. And, fortunately, for guys like you and me, there’s a very convenient method that is just a range trip away.

Seems like a good idea. But, really, you need to sink more than just a few rounds into each one of these.

But you have to remember – you would think that punching a couple holes in a drives platter would be enough. I would too. But I am virtually positive that someone, somewhere, has the technology to ‘skip around’ those damaged parts of the disk and get information. Sure, not all of it, but perhaps enough to be a problem. So…a couple holes ain’t gonna do the trick.

40harddrive

One or two hits won’t do it. You need to see daylight…a lot of it…through this thing.

Don’t spare the FMJ. What you want is enough metal-shredding terminal ballistics to remove great gouts of material.

image_4150

Much better!

I usually take the drive to the range, stand a few yards back from it, and hammer it with half a mag of .223 or .308 until it looks like some sort of shredded-metal sculpture. Then I twist and break it into a couple different pieces and toss ’em in the dumpster.

I saw on the news that the FBI is looking for the hard drive the San Bernadino shooters used. The feds had sent divers into a pond looking for the drive, which means that they fully expect to be able to recover data from a waterlogged drive…which is reasonable, since water won’t really affect magnetic disks. But you just know those guys have all sortsa technology for recovering data from disks people ‘thought theyd erased’.

I mention this not because you or I are engaged in criminal activities that we need to hide, (Well, I’m not..I dont know what youve been up to), but rather because it’s too easy to take the simple way out, whack the ol’ Western Digital with a hammer a few times, call it good, and toss a drive into the trash that could potentially come back and bite you in the butt.

So…if you got a new computer for Christmas, and youre tossing out that old drive to make new for the new shiny one, do the smart thing and head to the range with it.

Mag prices

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Today, Obama is supposed to give his ‘Im doing something’ speech on gun restrictions. I fully expect this to trigger yet another wave of panic buying. As a semi-scientific benchmark, at 9am MST the cheapest Magpul AR mag was $11.97. Let’s see what happens.

ETA: 5PM and they are all outta Magpul Pmags.

Adventures in food shelf-life

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When it comes to storage-type food, you very often trade flavor for shelf life. You can have a product that tastes really good, but only lasts a minimum amount of time…or you can have a product with a great shelf life but its flavor is such that you would only eat it after the fallout settles and the Kroger’s is a smoking ruin.

Years ago (eight years, actually) I bought a bunch of the Idahoan instant potatoes in pouches. I recommend these highly, and find them to be very good. So good, in fact, that when I’m feeling too lazy to peel, boil, and mash ‘real’ spuds I reach for these. For the price of two of these pouches I can buy a 5# bag of potatoes at my local supermarket, so economically it may not make a lot of sense to have them all the time, but for storage food….very highly recommend.

One concern I had was the durability of the paper pouches. Its heavy duty paper, to be sure…but how will it hold up over time? Funny you should ask….

13890According to Idahoans website FAQ, this particualr pouch o’ spuds was born almost eight years ago. I’d bought a bunch of these when they were on sale and stuffed ’em into a plastic tub, sealed it up, and sat it on the shelf with all the other mid-term food storage in the classic ‘cool,dry place’. But…after a few years, I was pretty certain theyd have gone stale or bad or whatever happens to dehydrated potatoes. In fact, while I wasnt sure enough to pull them off the shelf and discard them, I was sure enough to pull them off my inventory spreadsheet.

Well, to make a long story short, it appears that even in the simple heavy paper pouch, stored under good conditions, they actually held up quite well for eight years. No discernible loss of flavor or texture. In fact, they seemed just fine. So, despite theyre not being packaged in a long-term manner from the factory, if you just stuff the pouches into a hard container, seal it up, and store it under the usual conditions…it lasts just fine.

So…if you’re looking to ads something to the ol’ pantry that tastes good enough to eat on a regular basis, but has a shelf life that goes on for quite a while…..these come highly recommended.

 

2016

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2016 promises to be a pretty ungood year, if the current electoral prospects are anything to go by. Of course, 2015 wasn’t exactly full of happy-happy-joy-joy either.

One staple in scienc fiction and survivalist literature is the plot device where the hero(es) has access to some sort of stasis/cryonic teechnology that lets them ‘sleep’ for a few decades or centuries, to take up their life again in the future.otta admit, it has some appeal.

There’s an election in 11 months and the clock really is ticking in terms of being able to buy what is likely to become prohibited/regulated as ‘common nonsense’ and ‘unreasonable’ gun control laws get bandied about. More than anything else, I’d go with magazines by the bucketload if I were you.

Ruger takes another swing at making a marketable duty pistol

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Apparently Ruger, not content to sit on its laurels after actually having some marketing successes, is going to throw it all away by trying, yet again, to bring out a duty pistol.

Ruger is on a roll these days, releasing a new generation of rifles and handguns to meet the demanding demands of modern gun owners. A few years ago Ruger started their roll-out with the American Rifle, a great entry-level hunting gun. Then they moved to the Precision Rifle, this year’s TTAG Reader’s Choice award for Best Rifle of 2015. Now it looks like they’re expanding into the handgun market with a new set of striker fired guns . .

*sigh* Ruger makes a lot of great stuff, but an automatic pistol that corners the police/miliary/defensive market? Nope. The swung for the bleachers with the P85/89 series to try and win the US military contracts…and failed. The design evolved into the P95 (which, actually, I think is a great gun) and was only discontinued a few years ago…but never really wound up in any departments holsters. They retreated to the drawing board and came up with the SR9 series which should have done well for them but, again, didn’t burn up the gun counters of our fair land. And now they’re going to try again.

Smith and Wesson is a good example of a company that made lame autos and redeemed themselves with a successful design. The old 3/4 digit ‘Third/Fourth Generation’ autos were, in my opinion, terrible. Smith learned their lesson (although they had to go through the fiasco of the Sigma)  and came out with the M&P series which is actually a pretty good pistol. Ruger must be trying for that same redemption.

As I said, Im actually a really big fan of the P95DC series of autos. They can usually be had very reasonably, are tough as hell, built to take abuse, and only has a few more parts than the equally simple Glock. While I prefer the Glock (or HiPower) for most of my 9mm needs, I’ll never pass up a P95 if one comes up at a bargain price.

As with virtually every new product Ruger comes out with, I’m sure there’ll be the usual recall in the first year or two of production…after that it’ll be interesting to see if this thing has legs or if it winds up as another eveolutionary dead-end in Ruger’s quest to make a dent in the police/military sidearm market.