David Rauschenbach

I recently did some backyard gardening for pleasure in our current rental home in Phoenix, AZ. To focus the water, I dug some swales, and had some fun shaping mud with the kids.

Sat, 2011-06-11 16:49 — david

Potted plants doing well The plants in this pot are doing well, now that they are getting watered twice a day. The tips...	Palm After getting tired of looking at this bare patch of poolside dirt for a year, I put a $15 queen...	Palm in caldera This palm was struggling, so I put in in the center of a volcano caldera to get it more water....	Framed Palm
Palm in anenome I had fun with this new palm that I found in the yard, and transplanted into the center of a sea...	Palm in swale	Potted Hibiscus	Juvenile Palm
Palm in anenome—watered

Most intentional communities struggle with finances. Members oftentimes show up with a dream, invest large amounts of time and capital, and then find themselves struggling with their balance sheet, and needing to import a steady stream of money in order to keep everything going.

Communities with a central line of business provide an interesting advantage, in that they enable members to simply show up and go to work. Silver mine boom towns of the late 19th century offered this attractor, and so do modern communities that sell eco-tourism.

While travelling through Europe last week with my libertarian travel club, we somehow arrived onto the subject of evidence of an old nuclear event in the Great Lakes part of North America. I am including the relevant quote here, for those with a further interest.

The Agropolis Farm website presents a concept for regional, community-level farming. It provides an interesting and attractive visualization of a produce market that brings food one step closer to consumers. This represents an improvement in freshness and quality, a reduction in transportation, and a way to address largely untapped market demands for food distribution systems which empower consumers to directly supervise their food production supply lines.

Women require other women. When this environmental requirement is satisfied, their bodies produce oxytocin, "the mechanism by which love and affection positively affect health" (Marnia). Western civilization's residential and city planners, for lack of this fact, have left us with a legacy of isolated structures, apparently optimized for the needs of the male occupant, or the legal or economic convenience of the developer, while almost perfectly optimizing the social isolation and disconnectedness of its occupants.

If a woman's production of oxytocin evokes feelings of contentment, reduced anxiety, calmness, and security (Wikipedia), and if these qualifiers describe the normal baseline of a healthy (tribal?) woman, then the logical corollary is that the suppression of oxytocin due to the social isolation of disconnected living must also increase a woman's feelings of discontent, anxiety, fear, and insecurity.

In other words, the legacy of male-oriented residential and town planning has been producing varying degrees of crazy in our women. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

Simon Black recently recommended a book to his readers titled Emergency, by Neil Strauss. The recommendation was this:

“Neil tells an important story that we are all completely dependent on a functioning system of complex infrastructure.

We don't think about, for example, whether or not the lights will turn [on] when we flip the switch. We don't think about whether or not water will come out of the faucet, if the toilet will flush, if the grocery store down the road has food in stock, or if the gas station will be pumping fuel tomorrow. We take these things for granted... Emergency tells Neil's story about making this realization, ...”

I call this coming to one's senses, which happened to me at some point.

And as complex as the issue is, I think it can be reduced to a single question: “What is the ideal place to live?”. The relevance might not seem apparent on the surface, but bear with me.

I just found myself recommending the Stockman Grass Farmer again, this time to an acquaintance I met in NYC a few weeks ago who is researching small-scale closed agricultural systems. My standard line about this publication is that Allan Nation, its editor, is a collector of the world's very best agricultural R&D, which seems to be predominantly coming out of New Zealand and Argentina. If you want to grow something profitably, I could not imagine ignoring the wealth of information coming from this outlet.

Every quarter I stop through Berlin for a week of business, and I'm reminded of what Germany does best. This breakfast spread is fairly representative of how you will be served breakfast at the average humble hotel.

Last night I retrofitted my Ikea Galant corner desk with the GeekDesk adjustable height desk frame, enabling me to switch from sitting at my desk to standing at my desk in 18 seconds. Total cost of the retrofit: $634, plus 2 hours of labor.

At the 2009 Singularity Summit, Peter Thiel presented his views on the current global macro-economic situation, and made the case that, assuming the status-quo is to be preserved, new exponential growth in knowledge and technology would be required, in order to carry the growth requirements of the global economy.

On the one hand, knowing that Peter is a libertarian, he may have simply been making the case that the burdens of goverment and banking are a crippling factor, and dragging the economy into the abyss.

But on the other hand, what if the problem is not solely caused by the burdens of compounding interest and the stifling effects of the rise of the meddlesome state? What if we are witnessing a "peak technology", caused by a limited modern view of rational science, which as a result of its limited scope, has run its course?