John Robb: My Home Supports Me, Does Yours?

Resilience
John Robb

Increasingly, My Home Supports Me. Does Yours?

I think every home should be a productive asset.  An asset that helps you succeed in life and supports you as you get older. Unfortunately, most people don't see it that way. They see a home as an empty shell. Their perfect home doesn't produce.  In fact, it costs money.   Their homes only  generate a return if you are lucky enough to sell it for more than you bought it. That doesn't cut it for me.

Particularly when there are a great many low cost — in time, effort, and money — things that can be done to increase your homes ability to produce. Simple things people can do to avoid wasting money and making themselves vulnerable to adversity. The best way to do start is to take a modular approach.

A Modular Approach to Rainwater Harvesting

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John Robb: Global Economic Reset — And Surviving It

Communities of Practice, Officers Call, Policies, Resilience
John Robb

A Global Economic Reset? Don't Wait to Find Out. Build Something Better

By John Robb

Building a resilient life, home and community is its own reward.  It's simply the best way to live a good life.  However, there's also another reason to do it.  It's where the global system is headed, and the penalties for not starting early are steep.  To really understand this, here's a well-written and detailed report on how and why a collapse of our global financial and economic systems are likely to occur.

It's a new report called, “Trade Off” by David Korowicz.  Here's a quick summary:

  • The global financial and economic system is now a network. Everything is connected.
  • This system has become VERY big and VERY complex. It's simply beyond what government bureaucracies and markets were designed to manage/control.
  • Inevitably, as with all unstable systems that can't be manged/controlled, it will collapse. It will shrink to a size that can be managed through markets and bureaucracy.

As reports on this topic goes, it's very well written and provides quite a bit of conceptual detail.  However, as with ALL reports on this topic, it doesn't offer a solution.  Why? There simply isn't one available for the system as it is today. No fix. No patch. No tweak that will auto-magically fix our system's problems.  So, what happens when the global system resets? Nobody really knows, but….

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Reflections: Intelligence for the President Revisited

All Reflections & Story Boards, Economics/True Cost, Education, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience
Robert David STEELE Vivas
Click on Image for Bio Page

SHORT URL TO SHARE WITH OTHERS: 

http://tinyurl.com/Obama-Intel

I am delighted to find some of my earlier work being looked at with new eyes.

Intelligence for the President–and Everyone Else: How Obama Can Create a Smart Nation and a Prosperous World at Peace (CounterpPunch, Week-End Edition,Feb 29 – Mar 02 2009)

Fixing the White House and National Intelligence  (International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 23/2 2010)

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John Robb: Resilience from Natural Gas Generators Plus Rain Capture Systems & Water Storage Bladders

Resilience
John Robb

How to Avoid Fragility and Failure

By John Robb

Sandy knocked out power for 8.5 million people, mostly in New York and New Jersey.  Wow.  What's worse?

A week later, nearly a million people were still without power.

Now, a Nor'easter — a freezing cold version of a tropical storm that plagues New England during the Winter — just dropped nearly a record amount of snow on these same people.

NOTE: Again. Any time you hear “record-breaking” in relation to Finance and Weather, it usually isn't good news. When you hear it all the time, like we have recently, it's usually a sign that something is very wrong.

That's scary.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this difficult.  A home and community that is resilient can bounce back from a regional disaster like this in seconds, if not hours.  For example, my home and the homes of other people reading this letter right now didn't suffer an outage when the power went down.  We produced our own power.  Enough for us to serve as islands of resilience for our neighbors that didn't have this capability. To help them stay warm, recharge cell phones, take a hot shower, etc….

How?

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