[packrat]

Another idea: letting folks know about what tools are available in an area for rent or loan.
I’m thinking about the little poultry processing drums that pluck a chicken in record time, rather than pulling them by hand. If you knew where one was in your area, you could bring your small flock out to that farm or you might hie off with it for a weekend. One that was twenty miles away would be feasible, one that is in Cairo Egypt wouldn’t. If it was ‘for pay’ then it would fall under the marketing and entrepreneurship tabs.

For instance, I have a farrier family in Hickman County that nearly all the veterinarians use for their horses in the Middle Tennessee region, as the father/son pair can ably handle shoeing and veterinary care for hostile animals that aren’t safe for a standard veterinary tech to be anywhere near them. They travel further for larger groups of animals, like the stables kept by the likes of Anheuser-Busch.

I-bet-I’ll-wager that there are other, similarly fungible roving goods and services that would be very useful to know about , for each region of homesteaders.

Just ran into a family of folks in White Bluff that have been in the business of making Molasses for over a hundred years; if you haven’t seen their name on a bottle label or had a relative grow up in the area you wouldn’t know anything about them. A lot of the Plain Folk, Amish, Mennonites, are the same way. You could be hurting for rough cut lumber and not know anything about them through conventional adverts, it’s all word of mouth.

This might be a good platform for such quiet small family businesses that are not of the media-savvy “influencer” type, if the barrier to entry is low enough.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by  packrat.

[packrat]

You are in the age of surveillance drones. With minimal effort, someone can find your location, send out a drone to recon the place. In ten years, you may be able to hire out the job, no matter what the level of intrusion.

Now, Is it a probability? Ida know, how many people have you ticked off, or, um, ‘intrigued’? That’s probably one of the numbers for a variable in your calculations.

My sitch is the opposite. I like some privacy, the wife doesn’t care–unless I am outside in my underwear, somehow.

Anyway, what I did at my price point, was salvage a few of the uv-resistant, polycarbonate diffraction gratings off of disused fluorescent lighting rectangles. I was gas going to put sections of them up in the old house over windows where people could see right in to our bathroom area. She “wants light”? Okay, this provides all the light. it’s not even frosted, its a series of convex lenses the size of your pinky. You’d really have to be up on it to even get a fighting chance of looking in. No, she wants to be able to “look out”. Okay., I’m out. Happy Wife, Happy Life.

But this line of thinking may be of use to you someplace.

[packrat]

Agreed. The Amish, most Plain Folk, and the Mormon Church all take Provisioning seriously, and expects every family/group to have a store of food. They retain canning equipment and the systems to store and distribute food in bulk. That is a very admirable trait that other creeds and faiths have occasionally admired from afar, or scoffed at and discarded altogether. The larger part of this generation instead relies on frequent visits to merchants for the complete gamut of provisions needed for existence, including all of our food, to an extent that would leave our great-great-grandparents aghast at modern disconnection from the effort they needed to exert(and the core competencies they needed to possess) for survival.

[packrat]

The Tithe , in Old Testament times, went into the Storehouse of The Temple; in the New Testament church, it went to the church to support widows indeed of the church; also to the poor that were communing with them (communion, meals in common held by the body of believers).

[packrat]

I nearly settled on asking you where to find this field, until I discovered it on the “about you” tab.

Of the first two profiles that I clicked on, one is that of a ‘inaugural day user’ of this website who lists a location that is improbably over 5,000 miles away from mine. That’s their prerogative, I’m sure, especially if they are concerned with privacy, but I feel this obfuscation of actual location is counter to the goal of enabling F2F/IRL meetings as a community layer, rather than the other pathway downward, to this being ‘just another online forum’.

Just by looking at others’ profiles, I realize that I haven’t stumbled across certain data fields, but I in turn had something that looked like a free-form essay area, and I treated it as such.

I’m still metaphorically poking around here and punching buttons and pulling levers, just to see what they do.