Month: March 2022

The ethylene gas produced by apples keeps potatoes from sprouting. And by removing the apples from other produce, the other fruits and vegetables do not over-ripen quickly.

Although we seem to think and talk about food almost constantly, do we really know how best to preserve it or do we leave this responsibility to technology? Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Jihyun Ryou feels we no longer understand how to treat food.

Her Save Food from the Fridge project involves placing certain foods on a group of “knowledge shelves” outside the fridge. Perhaps through a better relationship with our food we may be able to waste less and conserve more energy.

Hey, Did you know ? Ethylene gas produced by apples will stop potatoes from sprouting

Ethylene gas produced by apples will stop potatoes from sprouting. Storing them together outside of fridge is best.The ethylene gas produced by apples keeps potatoes from sprouting. And by removing the apples from other produce, the other fruits and vegetables do not over-ripen quickly.

Storing root vegetables vertically keeps them fresher longer. The glass funnel is used to keep the sand moist.The umpteen tiny holes on the surface of an eggshell allows odors from other foods to be absorbed, so keeping them out of the fridge will ensure their tastiness.The humidity from spices, however, can be absorbed by rice so that they will not clump.

 

Continue reading here

Prepare for a Financial Doomsday

Many of us are preparing for the end of times; because as we all know it it is a matter of when not if. While many of us out there are preparing for the complete collapse of the world as we know it not many of us are preparing for a Financial Doomsday which will probably happen sooner than nature going haywire on us.

So how exactly do we prepare for a financial Doomsday/ Economic collapse. Through intensive research I have found way that I think will help anyone survive and Economic/ Financial Doomsday.

Save Money

This one is a bit of a obvious one but I have to put it out there. A shockingly high number of American families are operating without any kind of financial cushion whatsoever.

-According to a Harris Interactive survey, 77 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

-According to one recent survey, one out of every three Americans would not be able to make a mortgage or rent payment next month if they suddenly lost their current job.

This is one reason why so many Americans have lost their homes and why so many Americans have fallen below the poverty level in recent years. They simply had no cushion.

Last year, 2.6 million more Americans dropped into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.

Don’t let this happen to you. At a minimum, everyone out there should have a cushion that will cover at least 6 months worth of expenses. Preferably, you should have a cushion that will last you at least a year or longer. I know that sounds like a lot but trust me you will love having this around in case something does happen to you and your family.

The easiest way I found to do this is I used to buy a cup of coffee from Quick Trip every morning, it would cost me with tax 2.02 (it was their medium size I think if I remember correctly.). Then one day I really got to thinking how much could I save if I stopped drinking coffee well at least buying it from QT every morning. So I did simple math 2.02×7 is $14.14 a week or $56.56 a month about $678.72 a year!

And that was just a cup of coffee I of course cut out eating out, junk food for the most part and I am now saving well over $200 a month and putting all of that into savings. That is just one example of how I did it. I am sure there are many ways out there of saving money I have probably not even thought up of yet and I am talking about small things not drastic. Not to mention the cut of junk food has made me happier and healthier.

Investments

Now I want to be clear with this. This is not your typical investment…

Continue reading here

EPIC has submitted comments to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), recommending that the FCC improve upon its proposed broadband nutrition label by requiring providers to clearly state whether they disclose data to third parties, whether they collect more data about customers than necessary to provide broadband service, and whether customers can opt-out of these data practices. Earlier this year, the FCC announced plans to require broadband service providers to make certain disclosures about their service plans, including disclosures about privacy, in a form akin to a food nutrition label. The current FCC proposal only requires that providers link to their privacy policy from the nutrition label. EPIC explained that a mere link to a privacy policy is insufficient to explain the privacy implications of using a broadband service. Instead, EPIC proposed that the labels include yes/no checkboxes regarding providers’ data collection and disclosure practices, as well as consumer opt-out information. EPIC also recommended imposing the label requirement on all active broadband plans, instituting methods to verify label accuracy, and allowing state attorneys general to take action against providers that mislead customers. EPIC has long advocated for consumer privacy protections in broadband services and regularly files comments with the FCC.

Continue reading

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

(Psst: The FTC wants me to remind you that this website contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase from a link you click on, I might receive a small commission. This does not increase the price you’ll pay for that item nor does it decrease the awesomeness of the item. ~ Daisy)

by the author of The Faithful Prepper and Zombie Choices.

Last week my neighbor cautioned me that I needed to fill up with gas that night. “I’m friends with the owner of the gas station. He’s bumping up prices 30 cents per gallon tonight,” my neighbor told me. I filled up and woke the next morning to find that gas was $2.90/gallon. He was right. Gas was $2.60 the day prior. Rising gas prices were escalating.

As of yesterday, gas was selling for $4.30/gallon in my area. It had jumped well over a dollar per gallon in less than seven days. And it is only going to continue to go higher.

Though Russian oil only accounted for 10% of all the oil that Americans utilize, we are now officially no longer importing Russian oil. Instead, we’re looking at getting our gas from Iran and Venezuela.

Yes, you read that right. Iran and Venezuela.

Iran, the same nation where generals say, “Death to America,” and burn the flag in Parliament.

Venezuela, the same land that brought in nuclear-capable bombers from Russia a few years ago, that received shipments of Russian military equipment, and that moved troops to the Colombian border in 2022 with Russian assistance.

Sounds like a good idea.

It bugs me that this kind of stuff doesn’t surprise me anymore. No matter that the United States could literally drill all the oil that we would ever need. We’re being told we have to do deals with our enemies now instead.

If we avoid looking at the questions of national security this poses, what can we see about how this is going to impact your prices at the local grocery store?

Let’s start with looking at how rising gas prices hurts the farmer.

On average, a tractor runs somewhere around 13-17mpg. All the tractors I’ve ever seen run off of diesel. As of this writing, diesel is running right around $4.85 on average throughout the country. Personally, I’m seeing it at well over $5.00/gallon in my area, but we’ll stick to the national average for the sake of “fairness.”

Let’s say I’m a cattle rancher growing my own hay.

I have a couple of acres of it. I grow and bale myself to feed my cows throughout the winter, and I have to sit on that tractor for 20 hours to get all of my hay cut, raked, baled, and hauled out of those fields. Let’s say my tractor burns through 13.6 gallons/hour.

By…

Continue reading here

Looking for the perfect gift for the lawn lover in your life but don’t know where to start? The gift options for lawn enthusiasts are practically endless, so that’s really no surprise! Choosing a gift for people who love their outdoor spaces can be tricky, especially if you’re not really a lawn person yourself.

The good news is that yards require some maintenance year-round, so there’s no bad time to give a lawn or garden gift. Before you begin, have a decent idea of what your loved one’s outdoor space looks like and also an idea of their likes and taste. With that picture in mind, read on to find the perfect gift for the lawn lover in your life!

1. A book about lawn and garden care for their area.

Any great lawn enthusiast is always eager to learn new tips and tricks for keeping a well-manicured landscape even if they have a professional lawn care company service their yard. However, many people fail to realize that one of the most essential factors of lawn care is location! Mowing and watering techniques, grass species selection, and timing of lawn treatments are just a few of the many things that vary based on where your yard is located.

Purchasing a lawn care or gardening book that focuses specifically on their state (or, better yet, the local area) is both a thoughtful and genuinely helpful tool you can add to their collection. Be sure to sign the inside cover for that extra personal touch!

2. A new set of gardening accessories.

Lawn lovers don’t usually draw the line at caring for their grass. Some gardening will always be a necessary part of a presentable yard. So although gardening is more important to some than others, every lawn enthusiast is likely to have a set of heavily used and tattered gardening accessories. The perfect items to update for them!

Some items to include might be a caddy, gloves, a kneeling pad, a folding stool, a hat, and some simple short-handled tools like a trowel and weeder. Consider getting matching patterned sets or even getting some of the items personalized to show how much you care. Who wouldn’t love a fresh pair of monogrammed gardening gloves?!

3. Tools for lawn maintenance.

Naturally, lawn care tools are a great gift option for a lawn enthusiast. Whether you know your loved one needs new tools for getting rid of leaves, or for weeding, or a new automated sprinkler system, or a new edger, or even a new hose – you can know they’ll love it and use it.

However, always check first! Find a way to discover what they already have and what they really need. They will likely not appreciate a second blower. If you can’t check their shed inventory, be sure to include a gift receipt.

4. Seed packets or a plant

Just what every lawn or garden needs – more plants! Depending on whether your lawn lover enjoys…

Continue reading here

Ben Winters, a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the F.T.C. appeared to be applying a version of a legal doctrine known as “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” in which evidence is deemed inadmissible if it was obtained illegally. He said the commission had previously applied the doctrine when it fined Facebook about $5 billion for allowing Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm, to harvest personal information from its users.

“It’s a privacy case that was enforced using the only real privacy law we have — and it’s only for kids,” Mr. Winters said, referring to COPPA. “It’s interesting for the F.T.C. to use the poison-tree remedy in a more run-of-the-mill case, and that’s something we really want to be seeing.”

Read the full article here.

Continue reading

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

(Psst: The FTC wants me to remind you that this website contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase from a link you click on, I might receive a small commission. This does not increase the price you’ll pay for that item nor does it decrease the awesomeness of the item. ~ Daisy)

For the past two years, more and more people have been learning about food independence. People are cooking from scratch, gardening, and raising their own animals. And that’s great! It’s a big learning curve, but it’s so worth it in terms of food independence, the confidence of new skills mastered, and delicious meals. 

The internet holds a lot of advice on getting started with various animals. I started raising chickens in 2014, using what I’d learned from books and a fellow farmer to keep my birds alive. Since then, we’ve raised chickens, goats, and lambs for meat. Recently, I took pigs to the processor for the first time and encountered another big learning curve. I had heard pigs were difficult to load into trailers, but I didn’t quite realize the level of psychological warfare it was going to require. 

Because I had always heard you need to lure pigs into trailers with food, the night before, we didn’t give the pigs their dinner assuming Monday morning they’d be ready to follow us anywhere. I even boiled up a big pot of potatoes. My pigs always loved boiled potatoes. 

The pigs had been enclosed in an area with hot wire. We took down the hot wire, backed the trailer in, and grabbed the pot of potatoes.

The pigs were immediately suspicious.

I had never seen them so uninterested in food. We spent probably half an hour trying to get them interested. They would sniff the potatoes but then wouldn’t follow us. I thought maybe they only wanted food from their normal feeder, so we lifted the pig feeder into the trailer. No luck. I thought to myself, maybe we need something more exciting and addictive. We still had some leftover Easter candy from last year. I went inside and brought it back. 

The jelly beans worked, kind of. We had three pigs, a male who was the largest, and then two smaller females. The plan was to get the male into one side of the trailer and the females onto the other side. My kids and I started making a trail of jelly beans from the pigs to the trailer. We joked that we were like Hansel and Gretel. My bigger female was interested right away. She began to follow us, and we were able to lure her into one side of the trailer. We had to help her get her back legs up, but we got her in,…

Continue reading here

by Thomas McBrien, EPIC Law Fellow

Tomorrow, the Ninth Circuit will hear oral argument in Sanchez v. Los Angeles Department of Transportation, a case affecting the locational privacy rights of people who use e-scooters and ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft. In the case, L.A. residents are challenging a regulation that requires e-scooter companies to provide the government with detailed location tracking data for each scooter ride taken in the city. Like other mass location surveillance programs, the L.A. mobility data tracking program threatens to expose and memorialize where people live, work, play, worship, obtain medical services, and engage in other potentially sensitive activities.

The Mobility Data Specification (“MDS”), L.A.’s system for funneling data from companies to the Department of Transportation, has insufficient privacy protections given the highly sensitive nature of location data. MDS is one example of “smart city” surveillance technologies cities are increasingly adopting.

EPIC and the Center for Democracy & Technology submitted an amicus brief in the case urging the Ninth Circuit to protect L.A. residents’ locational privacy. In our brief, EPIC and CDT explained that L.A. can use mobility data to inform transportation policy decisions while also protecting the privacy of individuals.

L.A.’s Mobility Data Surveillance Program

When someone rides an e-scooter, the government should not be able to surveil their every movement. But this is now a reality for L.A. residents after the city implemented a regulation that requires e-scooter companies to provide GPS tracking data to the government through a set of application programming interfaces (“APIs”) called the Mobility Data Specification (“MDS”). MDS standardizes mobility data so cities and the companies that work with the data can more easily ingest and analyze information from multiple e-scooter companies. E-scooter companies must use MDS to provide L.A. with the start point, end point, route, and time of each ride taken.

MDS has some measures to protect privacy, but they are insufficient given the sensitive nature of location data. MDS, for example, does not include riders’ names or account information. L.A. claims that this feature makes rides anonymous. But rides cannot be truly anonymous when the government collects precise information about each route. With only a little time and effort, it is possible to infer some riders’ identities based on patterns in the data or combining the data with other sources of data, similar to how people may be reidentified in anonymous datasets based on their cell phone location. The danger of reidentification of individual trip data is not theoretical: as an example, data sleuths were able to identify passengers from a purportedly anonymous set of NYC taxi trips by combining the trip data with other publicly available information. Those who use e-scooters most frequently, such as low-income residents who cannot afford their own cars or taxis and who may be underserved by public transportation, are especially at risk of reidentification. MDS could also have privacy implications for more than just e-scooter users: its creators have stated their desire to have MDS…

Continue reading

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

(Psst: The FTC wants me to remind you that this website contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase from a link you click on, I might receive a small commission. This does not increase the price you’ll pay for that item nor does it decrease the awesomeness of the item. ~ Daisy)

By the author of The Faithful Prepper and Zombie Choices.

Look at what is currently happening in the world around you and use that information to make deductions. When you see storm clouds on the horizon, you’re able to deduce that a lightning storm is on its way, preparing accordingly.

What storm clouds are on the horizon? Perhaps these are indicators you may want to pay more attention to.

Belarus removed its nuclear sanctions.

For starters, Belarus has removed its nuclear sanctions, meaning that Russia can now move nuclear weaponry into the country.

Belarus is adjacent to both Ukraine and Russia and was used as a staging point for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This lifting of sanctions could easily be the legal logistical move needed for land-based tactical nuclear weapons to be brought into the region.

Taiwan experiences a power outage.

Taiwan suffered a power outage that took down a third of the country’s power supply last week. Seven cities – including the capital – were hit by the power outage in what was allegedly due to a “malfunction of equipment.”

If you remember the Stuxnet hack of Iranian nuclear centrifuges, you’ll recall that it was technically a “failure of equipment” that caused catastrophic damage to the Iranian nuclear program. I don’t believe for a second that a third of a country just “accidentally” lost power as a result of unforeseen entropy.

Cyberattacks set the stage for war. War revolves around logistics. Only when the stage is set, do the soldiers take the field.

“Welp, can’t buy that anymore.”

Do you believe that the free market can tell us about what the public at large is thinking? I do. If you find yourself believing the same, just know that as of this writing, Cresson Kearney’s Nuclear War Survival Skills book has sold out on Amazon. Mr. Kearney’s book is also available at several different places online at no charge. (Here’s one such link.)

We’ve most certainly been pushing that book here at The Organic Prepper, but our site alone surely can’t be attributed to the selling out of such a popular book. Interestingly, it’s difficult to find Geiger counters on Amazon that are in stock at the moment as well.

It appears that the world is taking the threat of a nuclear attack seriously. Are you as well? We put together a quick anthology of all our nuclear preparedness and information articles that you can get here and name your…

Continue reading here

By Travis Fain, state government reporter

At the height of the pandemic, as unemployment surged across the country, tens of thousands of North Carolinians sent pictures of themselves to a private company—a new state requirement to confirm their identities—before they could get unemployment benefits.

It was an emergency measure meant to cut down on fraud as tens of thousands of jobless claims poured in daily to North Carolina’s overwhelmed Division of Employment Security.

The tradeoff—personal information for income in hard times—may have come at the expense of privacy. As many as 270,000 North Carolinians are now in a facial recognition database that the company planned to keep for up to seven-and-a-half years and, in some cases, share with law enforcement.

That’s in flux after pushback from privacy groups and members of Congress worried about the company’s rapid expansion. Virginia-based ID.me says it has contracts with 30 states, as well as some federal agencies, and that it provides “digital identity to 70 million Americans.”

The company says it helped prevent billions in unemployment fraud nationwide as states grappled with massive jobless claim volumes that enabled fraudsters to hide within the system. The U.S. Department of Labor last year said some $83 billion may have gone out improperly, with “a significant portion” due to fraud.ADVERTISING

But a federal plan to require facial recognition to access IRS records was a tipping point. After a backlash, the Internal Revenue Service said this month that it would drop those plans, and ID.me said it would let all ID.me users delete photos on file with the company beginning Tuesday by logging in to their account.

“ID.me is an identity verification company, not a biometrics company,” the company said in that announcement, using a catch-all word for images and other data that quantify physical features.

Deletions will take place within seven days of receiving a request, the company said in a statement Friday, but it wasn’t clear how people will be informed that the option exists. “We are working through any communications with our state government agency partners,” the company said.

A growing universe

Experts said ID.me’s government contracts represent one more privacy encroachment in a world rapidly implementing facial recognition technology, which uses computers to identify people by comparing their picture to a database of images.

The North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles, for example, has an online portal that law enforcement can use to request facial recognition searches of the state’s drivers license database, no subpoena required. A DMV spokesman said he couldn’t say how often that happens because requests aren’t tracked.

A number of local governments have or are adding surveillance cameras with facial recognition capability. Two years ago the Raleigh Police Department said it would stop using a facial recognition service that had scraped billions of images from social media and the internet without people’s consent.

Earlier this month The Washington Post reported that this same service, Clearview AI, told investors it’s on track to have 100 billion photos in its database within a…

Continue reading