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Urban
Self-Sufficiency

Tiny Homes – the Big Picture

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OFf-Grid News reports on the booming Tiny Homes movement.

The houses are the size of a regular settee or a little bigger. They are painted in happy colours — yellow, pink, blue — and have names, RDX2, The Chuck Wagon, Uni-Bomber and so on. The floors are made of wooden pallets reclaimed from leftover construction material; the windows are discarded washing machine doors. The insides are insulated with the help of pizza delivery bags. And these dwellings have wheels. Total cost of construction: $30-40 per house. Selling price: Free.…

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June 13, 2014 No Comments
Urban

Shop the bunker

prepperposhThe Spectator newspaper reports that an architect who usually designs Manhattan skyscrapers was recently asked to pitch for a far more interesting project. The client, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, wanted him to design a family house in upstate New York with a difference. It wouldn’t just be completely ‘off the grid’, with its own power and water supplies, but — and there isn’t yet an architectural term for this — it would be post-apocalypse. The conventional house would be mirrored below ground with pretty much identical living quarters that would be completely secure and so self-contained that there would be facilities to hydroponically grow plants and vegetables without soil.…

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June 1, 2014 1 Comment

Another cool tiny home

They have zero debt, plus their heating and cooling bills are much lower.

If This House Doesn’t Look Like Much To You, Wait Til You Go Inside. I Love Everything About This.

After spending years in the rat race, with their lives revolving around paying a hefty mortgage, Andrew and Gabriella Morrison decided to call it quits. They bravely decided to downsize to save money and adjust their lives so they could focus on more important things than monthly bills.

…
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May 3, 2014 3 Comments

Inequality is why so many want out of the system

The war on drugs sends thousands of poor kids to prison for using the same illegal substances that rich whites can often get away with; meanwhile, Wall Street bankers responsible for the financial crisis get off with zero punishment and huge bonuses.

These disparities in how rich and poor are treated by police and courts are the subject of The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, a book by Matt Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone journalist who has made a career of attacking the upper class (and just started a website about political corruption).…

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April 29, 2014 5 Comments

App uses social media data to make avoiding people easier

A new iPhone app allows users to harness the power of social media to become as anti-social as possible.

Cloak lets users view a map with location data taken from their friends’ Foursquare and Instagram posts in order to avoid contact.

Users can flag specific friends — or all of them — and will receive an alert if they’re nearby. The warning distance ranges between within one block and 2 miles.…

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March 23, 2014 No Comments
Wenatchee Treehouse in danger of demolition by local council
Urban

“$1m” Tree House under threat

A family in Wenatchee, WA have been told they can only keep their tree house if they takes out a $1M insurance policy in case it falls down

Zeb Postelwait built a tree house for his young sons in the front yard but the council say it is a threat to public safety.
Postelwait disagrees, says it is secure and does not obstruct the sidewalk. The council says that if Postelwait does not remove it, they will have an engineer appraise it, obtain an order to remove it and tear it down – and send him the bill for all costs.…

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March 14, 2014 1 Comment

Not prepped at all….

During this last major cold snap, I heard a story on NPR (National Public Radio), it’s the only radio station we can pick up out here, it’s quite a bit left leaning for our tastes, but we take that into consideration when we listen, especially to the news stories.

So this story was about (yet another) major cold snap that was about to hit major parts of the USA, there were going to be states of emergency declared because of the snow, ice and very low temps. There were going to be school and business closings.

The thing that really caught my attention, the thing that surprised me (but probably shouldn’t have) is the talk about “runs on the stores”, they were preparing for, get this, being potentially shut in for, …

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February 9, 2014 8 Comments
Communities

Living inside the box

04 This absolutely falls under the “How cool is that!” category… I have seen lots of sheds, workshops and homes made out of shipping containers, some are buried in the ground, most just sit on the ground, some people are creative with them and create an entire home out of multiple containers. Most can be found in rural areas of the USA…

This has to the the most interesting one I have seen to date. These folks owned a small (read TINY) lot in NY, after lots of work and convincing, they created their home with several of these containers stacked up, it’s modern looking, it’s sleek, it’s clean and it works!…

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January 12, 2014 2 Comments
Kansas Underground shelter owner Roberto Vicino of Terravivos
Urban

Private Underground Shelters

Kansas Underground shelter owner Roberto Vicino of TerravivosDisaster preparedness is big business in the USA. The big banks all have shadow rooms, vast cavernous buildings on the edge of New York and Chicago where the entire dealing team cold decamp in the event of another 9/11 or another Sandy or a power outage caused by a solar flare – actually not the last one, because then everything would go phut.

The U.S. government maintains a series of deep underground bunkers. Their purpose is mostly to protect the president and top U.S. government officials from a catastrophic incident.

But very little is done to protect private citizens from the effects of global catastrophes. We will largely be left to fend for ourselves.

Until Now.…

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November 6, 2013 1 Comment

Taking an urban apartment off the grid

London, Ont., Roommates Stephen Szucs and Dave Pope are living with no fridge, air conditioner, stove or hot, or running water this summer after deciding to disconnect from the electrical grid for three months.

At the beginning of June, the two, who are calling themselves the “Sustainable Joes,” cancelled their electricity, emptied their fridge and turned off their hot water heater in their two-bedroom apartment in a downtown London house. Until the end of August, they will be showering outside and using only the electricity they collect using a small number of solar panels.…

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July 3, 2013 1 Comment
Urban

Doomsday Prepper arrested with live alligator

A “doomsday prepper” who was arrested Tuesday after Dallas police found bomb making materials and a Glock in his car has been kept in federal custody while his case is pending.

The decision was made by a judge after a search of his house turned up drugs, dangerous chemicals and a live alligator, according to the office of U.S. Attorney Sarah Saldaña.

Clayton Todd Earthman, 24, appeared in court Friday when the order was made. Knuckle-dragging Earthman is charged with being an unlawful user and addict of controlled substances in possession of a firearm, authorities said.

How he came by the alligator has been well-documented online:…

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June 23, 2013 1 Comment
Self-Sufficiency

Slums – testbeds for new ways of living

We should not romanticise slums, but informal settlements can teach us a lot about society and the economy of resources.

Its amazing , for example, how most of us who live in cities, pay lip service to recycling – doing a bit here and there – consisting mainly of throwing bottles into the correct colored bag for the garbage disposal company to deal with.

The informal settlements of the global south could not be further removed from the financial centers where most of us spend our lives. But recycling is something that slum inhabitants do naturally, without expensive schemes.

In the slums you can find a whole new social geography … re-focus on adaptation and reuse and using scarcity as a resource to highlight the aspects that function better than the formal city around it.…

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June 1, 2013 No Comments