Well good morning. Good morning. I like that. It's Saturday morning. You're giving up your Saturday morning to come listen to and get an update on our process for the park recreation and open space master plan for the city of Fort Worth Parks and Community Services Department. Again, I want to express my appreciation on behalf of our board and our staff for you taking time on the Saturday morning to come down here. Where we are in this process our first master plan and you'll see in a minute was actually 1909 done by Kessler and we've had subsequent plans to that but in 1998 we shifted to a more needs assessment need-based plan to help position us to be able to be competitive primarily for grants both at the state level and the national level and you hear a little bit more about that how we've done that but it also does measures that are based on the National Recreation and Park Association as well as the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration so it sets standards. It helps us plan better from the standpoint of both taking care of existing infrastructure and addressing growth in the community. It drives policies such as our neighborhood park dedication policy which helps us keep up with growth both in neighborhood parkland and community parkland and I'll just stay on that and that it helped adjust that policy which was actually established in 1978 so that we were not only picking up neighborhood parkland but in 2000 there was a significant change which enabled us to pick up both neighborhood parkland and funds for community parkland and the result of that policy change in 2000 is that in 2010 we were able to assemble enough funding to make a purchase of seven million dollars for a 245 acre community park which is now called Northwest Community Park up at 156 in Harman Road and let me just carry that a little bit further. We used the land value to apply for a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department grant. We received that grant one million dollars that's enabling us to do our first phase development and because of that springboard and the need for based on our needs assessment athletic facilities in that far northern area the recent bond program appropriated 2.6 million for us to do that and we get to fire another bullet in the Parks and Wildlife grant competition and we submitted a grant application this past summer for that same project so we'll know whether we'll receive that grant in January when the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission meets and awards those grants so I just tell you that short story to kind of explain how this whole process helps position us to leverage alternative funding. In the end whatever we do has to be supported by resources and to sustain it and that's something you'll hear me say constantly is whatever you build you've got to take care of and so we want to make sure that we're being good stewards in that regard. Let me make a couple of quick introductions. We have some members of our parks and community services advisory board with us today. Sheila here is back here. She is the chair of the board. Chase Dustin is up here on the front row. He is place 7 and Diane Criswell is in the back and she is place 3 and I'm not sure if we had any other board members show up today. They have worked on this process. We briefed them on September 24 at a work session talked about how we go through the update and talk a lot about trends which you'll see here in a minute in the presentation but this is really a report out and the last thing I'll say is in the 98 process and in the 2004 process again we base our information on our needs assessment and input that we receive through technology and through the board but the staff came to me and said you know the last two times we didn't really do a report out in this process. We think it would be a good idea to do that so hats off to them to take in the initiative to say let's get everybody together and this invitation went out to the League of Neighborhoods but also all of our support groups and people that we work with, the Sports Advisory Council, the Botanical Society, the Fort Worth Garden Club, the Prince of the Nature Center. I could go on. We couldn't do the kinds of things that we do in the Fort Worth park system if it weren't for folks that get involved and help support us in many ways. So with that I'd like to turn this over to Joel McElaney and Joel is the I guess the architect of this process and his staff is here and after this meeting this report out will continue to have an opportunity for folks to provide input and to visit with staff as well. So Joel. Thank you and I echo Richard's sentiments. I greatly appreciate you all taking time out of your weekend, your Saturday to come out here today. Obviously there's a lot of passion for parks and that's good for us because without your passion for parks we wouldn't have a job. So I really appreciate you all coming. What we're going to go through today, our Park Recreation Open Space Master Plan. Richard gave a great description of what it is, how it's used and he even gave a little bit of the history of it. I'm going to repeat a little bit of that and just give that overview of what the master plan is, what some of the inputs are that we consider in making recommendations within the master plan. A little snapshot of demographic change in the population growth we've experienced over the last 15 years. Go through our public input process. We're meeting here today but and there is an online survey available but that's not really the start of our public input process. It started back in 2013 with the needs assessment study and I'm going to go through that. What's happened there today. Next we're going to look at some of the facility standards and I just want to explain how we arrive at standards of parkland to population or athletic fields or other facilities like playgrounds, trails to population. I want to explain where that comes from and we'll look at some of the emerging trends, some of the new park recreation resources that we're seeing out there that people are asking for. It may be in neighboring cities, it may be around the country. And last I'll go through the schedule for the plan from today through when we anticipate bringing this to our city council for adoption. The purpose of the plan, so why do we put time and resources into developing this plan? Richard touched on this a little bit. Basically the master plan, our park recreation open space master plan provides that framework or vision for providing park and recreation resources to our community in the city of Fort Worth. By identifying our needs and prioritizing those needs we can be strategic about putting funding toward future capital improvements. And also our master plan allows us to partner with other organizations in providing those resources. We identify our mission and we can partner with non-profit groups like streams and valleys or friends of groups, you have friends at Tandy Hills, friends of the Fort Worth Nature Center, there's a Botanic Society that's active here at the Botanic Gardens. There's also other public agencies like Tarant Regional Water District or the various independent school districts that we can partner with on projects as well and provide recreational resources to the community. And last, grant applications. Texas Parks and Wildlife, Richard mentioned we've been successful in our applications for Texas Parks and Wildlife grants and since 2010, the last four years, we've applied for four grants and we've been the highest scoring application on all four of those applications, that totaled $3.1 million. And we actually have another application in, Richard mentioned, in late August we submitted another application, a million dollar application for Northwest Community Park up in North Fort Worth and that jury's out on that one yet. We'll find out in January whether or not we received that funding. History of the plan and Richard mentioned the first park master plan, citywide master plan was developed in 1909 by George Kessler. We call it the Kessler plan and the Kessler plan and the subsequent 1930, 1957 higher and higher plans, they really laid out that vision for some of our core parks within the city. The Trinity Park, Foster Park, Cobb Park on the east side, Rock Springs Park, which later changed names to the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, were all included in that plan, many other parks as well. But those sort of those core parts of our system were identified in those master plans. In 1991, the city commission that's first needs assessment study and that was the foundation of the 1992 park and recreation department strategic plan. So from that plan we changed and became more strategic in our citywide master plan for parks. They were always based on a needs assessment. We got that public input before doing the master plan. We identified a mission statement, goals and objectives. We identified needs and we prioritized those needs in all these plans, 92, 98, 2004, the 2010 update and we're following suit today. We did a needs assessment study in 2013 and I'll get in and I'll explain what all went into that and how that was put out there. But that is the foundation for the 2015 master plan. What's all included in the plan? Goals and objectives, I mentioned we have a departmental mission statement, of course it was citywide mission statement. We have a departmental mission statement. We have goals and objectives to help us realize that mission. We identified the plan development process, what all went into this. We identify our park facility standards. I'll talk about those here in a couple slides. We inventory our park facilities. You got to know what you have before you start thinking about what you need. So we include an inventory of our current parks and park facilities. A needs assessment, I mentioned that a couple times now. The 2013 needs assessment and all the public input we received through the 2014 bond program and survey that's available today, that will go into the master plan as well. And last we prioritize those needs based on public input and goals and objectives. Some of these inputs that go into the plan's recommendations include the public input, of course, the staff input. We have people out in the parks every day maintaining parks, working in community centers, managing capital improvement projects, building new park facilities, and administering our park dedication policy. People that are actively working in the parks. So they have input as well that's considered in the plan. We look at trends, nationwide trends and resource park facilities. Some new things that were coming online. I'm going to touch on those at the end of the presentation here. These are things we're seeing in neighboring cities and they're things we're hearing from the public that they want to see here in the city for work. We also consider national standards. As park professionals our national association is the National Recreation and Park Association and or the NRPA. And that group has facility standards that they recommend for level of service of parkland based on population or facilities such as playgrounds, athletic fields, and trails. Facility standards based on population that they recommend at the national level. We of course take into consideration what our own priorities are that we hear from you and what some of our neighboring cities, their level of service. So we take that in consideration and make it fit for the city forward. We have federal mandates in particular the Americans Disabilities Act has requirements on accessibility trails or playgrounds that we have to consider in including recommendations in our master plan and last demographics. And on that I just wanted to highlight this very briefly here. You all may have noticed there's a lot of population going on this growth going on the city forward here. The population hovered around 400,000 for several decades. In 2005 we had a population of 534,000 and currently the estimate is 781,000. So to do the math on that we've added 250,000 people or a quarter million people have been added to the population of the city of Fort Worth. Obviously there's an increase in need for parkland, neighborhood and community parks for these new residents and there's a possibility that our priorities may change. We have a bunch of new opinions with 250,000 people added in. So it's important that we go back and update this plan and identify what those new priorities are. The public input process for the 2015 plan didn't start today with this meeting and it didn't start a few days ago when we got our online survey posted on the city website. It started in 2003 with a needs assessment study. Our department commissioned a professional survey group to conduct this needs assessment study and this group mailed out 20,000 questionnaires throughout the city randomly chosen residents. There was an option of completing it online or mailing the survey back in. The survey then was also posted on the city of Fort Worth website and linked on the Facebook page for the city of Fort Worth and downtown Fort Worth, Inc. And it was also mailed out to the registered neighborhood organizations and that's something I wanted to highlight here that if you're in an HOA, you should really check if your HOA is registered with the city of Fort Worth as a registered neighborhood organization. Michelle Goote at the front is our director of communications. She was just to the right when you walked in the front door there and her group sends out those communication to registered neighborhood groups. If your group is not registered, we don't have your information. We can't get the information out to you so that's important to check on. Next, additional public input was through the 2014 BOM program. You all may have attended. If you took time out of your day here on Saturday, you all may have attended some of the public meetings. We have 31 of them that went into the 2014 BOM program. There was also an opportunity to provide input through the city website. It was yourfortworth.com. That was the link they established for that. So all that public input was documented and this is importantly we identified what meeting that input came from. So if it was a meeting on the east side or north side or south side, that's along with the comments. So we have that data that we can also consider in prioritizing needs. And last we have our survey that's currently posted online. We mirrored the needs assessment questions. And the purpose of this is we're getting the word out there. We're going to move through several steps here before this plan. It goes to city council and we seek their adoption. And I'll go through that process, that schedule at the end. But since we're having this public meeting, we know there's opinions out there and we want to give the people an opportunity to memorialize those comments and opinions in a survey. So we got that online. It was linked last week. We're going to continue to run that for another two weeks after this meeting. So I encourage you all to complete that and also tell your friends, neighbors about it and so they can fill that out as well. Some of the evolving needs we have, I just wanted to highlight here. In 2004, our needs assessment study, the number one identified need on there was restrooms and large parks. And there was some of your other typical facilities like playgrounds and picnic shelters. But in 2013 needs assessment study, the number one was hike and bike trails. Number two is open space. These weren't even in the top five. So they're number one and two now but they weren't back there in 2004. They weren't in that needs assessment in 2004. So that's just a little glimpse of how needs change. The park facility standards. I wanted to go through just some of the contents of the plan and also we'll mention the 2004 plan, the 2010 update are available online on the city website. We have a parks and community services webpage and you can view those documents there. We also put several copies at the front. A little sticker on there, please return to table. That's just because we wanted everybody to be able to see that and if one walks out of the building it's really no big deal but we did want to give everybody the opportunity to take a look at it. Our park facility standards are identified in there. So if you get a chance to go through that plan you can take a look at these. These standards include a ratio of parkland, neighborhood and community parkland based on population. They also include facility standards for other items. I mentioned this before like soccer fields, baseball fields, playgrounds or tennis courts. Those are all population based standards. One of the things we're considering for this year's 2015 plan is some geographic based standards for facilities. For example, a dog park. It may not make sense to have a population based standard for a dog park but it does make sense to provide dog parks throughout the city geographically. We currently have the Fort Wolf dog park in East Fort Worth. It's very popular. We're building our second dog park in North Zebo's Park in West Fort Worth. A geographic based standard to include to provide dog parks in each quadrant of the city is something that we're considering right now. Other classifications you'll see in there are definitions of our park facilities, of our definition of our pocket park, which is a one to five acre park or neighborhood park, five to 20 acres. Community park 20 to 75 acres and then our regional parks are 70 acres plus. An example of a community park would be Gateway Park. That type of park, there's just multiple facilities in there. There's our artificial turf soccer and rugby complex. There's natural surface soccer fields. There's Fort Wolf dog park I mentioned and just several facilities in one park and that moves it to that regional park classification. Community parks typically have athletic fields and their destinations. People drive there. They have a parking lot. It provides a service that you don't find in your neighborhood park. That neighborhood park is where we typically have our playgrounds, picnic shelters, a walking trail. These are typically in the neighborhood. No parking because people walk there. That's anticipated that they would walk to this type of park. The same with the smaller pocket park. That would be one embedded in the neighborhood and people can walk there. We also have special use facilities on here. That would be your singular use type parks like a golf course. One of the changes we're looking at to park classifications we're considering is the addition of green belts. The parks we get outside the loop in developing areas often are adjacent creeks or drainage ways and they become an opportunity to create a linkage between parks with a trail. As we saw in 2014 or 2013 needs assessment, trails were the number one ranked priority. However, there's also that need to provide neighborhood park as well because people want the playground and a space for a practice field and that sort of thing. Having a classification for a green belt is something that we're considering adding to this year's master plan. Other park facility considerations we got to take into account are more dense areas. Fort Worth is a big city and I'll talk about that when I get into defining our park planning districts. We have older infrastructure that's more dense areas that are being revitalized and new growth in the inner city and we have growth in the outer city and the needs in the inner city are going to be different than outside the loop. One of the considerations is how we provide open space in a more dense area where the cost of land is more expensive. The pocket park is defined as a one-acre park. It may be cost-prohibited to acquire one acre in some of these more dense areas, but people that live in those areas still need that close to home park or open space that they can have access to. That's a couple considerations for this 2015 plan, the addition of the green belt, park classification, and how we provide open space in the more dense areas. The park and recreation open space master plan is that framework providing park and recreation resources city-wide, but we're a big city. 349 acres, a population near 800,000. We have new development happening outside the loop. We have redevelopment happening in the inner city in higher density areas, so it's impossible to really create that one-size-fits-all. So we've defined these park planning districts for us to be able to rank priorities specific to geographic area. You can get a closer look at these park planning districts out there on the boards, but just to show you on here, I mean this whole colored map, that's a city of Fort Worth. The park planning districts are around here, one in South Fort Worth, two in West, three is the East Side, four is everything within the loop, and five is North Fort Worth. So just visually, I want to give you that idea. These boundaries do not follow political lines. They don't overlap with council districts. The purpose is meant to be apolitical, but within the master plan, you'll notice that back in 2004 and in the 2010 update, and in the 2015 plan, we ranked priorities based on park planning district. So again, what matters to the people up in park planning district five, what's a high priority up here, may not be the same as what's in the central city or out in East Fort Worth. Priorities may be different. They are different, and that's why we ranked them independently like that. Last, I'll get into just some of the new trends. It's kind of a fun part of the presentation. So what are we seeing? What are we hearing about? What are people asking for? People go to other cities, go to Arlington, Dallas, or they travel across the country, and they come back and say, hey, we got to have that here in Fort Worth. Some of these specialized facilities, Disc Golf, we've seen that for a couple decades now. City now has four Disc Golf courses, but something new is Foot Golf. That's something I just heard about about six months ago. You use a soccer ball instead of a golf ball. Use your foot instead of a golf club, and thankfully they made the cut bigger. So we all had a chance. So Foot Golf is new. We have one football course at Rockwood Golf, or yeah, one course at Rockwood Golf Course. Nancy's nodding, so I know I'm right. So we added that. Another new sport is Futsal, or at least it's new. We're hearing about it more recently. Futsal is similar to soccer. Use a smaller ball. It's played on a hard court. It can be played indoors or outdoors, and it uses smaller goals and a few number of players. So it takes up a smaller footprint, and we now have some people using tennis courts for Futsal courts. And so that's something that's new, and we're hearing more about. Next, the other specialized facilities. Dog parks. I mentioned Fort Wolf a couple times, and we have of course the new dog park at North Zebos and West Fort Worth. It's going to be under construction here. But skate parks is something more relatively new. We have a great new skate park over in the east side in Arlington. You know, it kind of galls me to say it. But we have $600,000 allocated out of a $3.8 million in 2014 bomb program for a skate park facility in South Fort Worth at Chisholm Trail Community Park. So we're hearing that. People are traveling around. They're seeing some great skate park facilities, and they want to see that type of facility here in Fort Worth. We built some smaller skate parks, or we built one, excuse me, at Marine Park in North Fort Worth. This is, could be classified as a skate pocket. That's a smaller, almost like a pocket park, but it's just a smaller skate park facility. But there's a, we're hearing about skate parks all the time. And on this list here, last one is universal playgrounds. All of our parks meet the Americans with Disability Act guidelines or requirements, and they provide a variety of play resources that stimulate different senses. The universal playground does this at a much larger scale, provides those play components that stimulate senses like touch and sound and visual insight. The play components also include ramps that allow access throughout the play structure, typically.  And that's our first universal playgrounds built back in the early 90s at Patricia LeBlanc Park. The 2014 bond program included funding for the replacement of that playground. Next, the outdoor fitness. We've been using parks for fitness as long as there's been parks, because that was the original purpose of the public park is for to get outside and live a healthy life. But something we're seeing a little more of is organized fitness classes within our parks. We have agreements with several of the boot camp instructors. They lead classes out at Trinity Park and various parks. These are things like CrossFit training. And we have installed fitness equipment, some parks. Rosemount Park is the exercise equipment out there. And that's something we're hearing. There's a need for that. The fixed equipment and also the organized instruction. And the last one I'll talk about for emerging trends is just technology, because it really couldn't get away with talking about an update without talking about changing technology. We used to call it Orienteering and we'd use a compass and we go out to a park and we try to find our way around. Now some of them relatively knew it's been around for ten or plus years is geocaching. People are using a GPS unit to find a note or a hidden treasure that sort of thing out in public parks. A couple more new technology trends are drones, of course in the war effort. That's when we first heard that term. But now you can buy a drone at Walmart or Amazon.com. And we know there are people are, they're going to look to their public park to fly the drone. And that we just have to be conscious of potential conflicts between that and other park uses. And the last apps or phone applications, the picture on the bottom right here is Fresh Kills Park in New York. People, there's so many apps out there, they just expect it now. This app for Fresh Kills New York includes way finding information, interpretive information that people have. So that's something we have to be conscious of that there's going to be interest in that. Okay, as I wrap up here, I'm going to go through the schedule, taking this plan through adoption. We met with our park board in a work session on September 24th and we made a presentation to the Development Advisory Council on October 20th. And the Development, excuse me, the Development Advisory Committee, that group is made up of the developers that are out there building the new housing whether it be revitalizing areas within the city in the more dense type areas or new development, green field development, they call it out in the outlying areas. It's important to get their input because after we, after this plan is adopted, it's the basis for a park dedication policy and that is a policy for providing parkland for future residents as new housing is built whether it be in the central city or out outside the loop. There's a fee that developer pays for neighborhood and for the provision of neighborhood and recreation parkland and park development for the new residents that are going to be living in those homes. The next step after today's meeting is going to be to go back to park board for a work session. We're going to take our public input that we've received to the needs assessment study, the bond program and the survey that we have running right now present that back at the work session and make recommendations for changes, work with our park board and get their input and what changes they recommend as well. And we will go back for a park board action item in December and that would be when we seek the park board's endorsement of the plan. That isn't that both these the work session and the December meeting are both open and the public are welcome to come in the next meeting as well and I'll say that and fill out a comment card. Now the work session, that's when we're working with the park board. Anybody can speak there but it would probably be at the end of the meeting and usually Sheila Hill our chair of the park board will state, you know, she'll explain that at the park board meeting. But at the action item, that's when the public can speak right there, right when it's on the floor for consideration. Also in December, we'll go to our plan commission. Now this park recreation and open space master plan is adopted into the city comprehensive plan by reference. So we need the plan commission's endorsement as well. And that's also a public meeting where the public can speak. And then we go to January. We will seek our city council's adoption of the plan January 15. Again, it is a public meeting. Public is invited to speak. It's not a public hearing, but it is a it's a non consent item. So anybody that wants to speak on it can fill out a comment card and go up and voice their support or concerns at that time. And last, I just wanted to highlight again the public meeting survey that is it's available on our city parks web page. The also the 2004 master plan, the 2010 update in the 2013 needs assessment are also linked here at the same spot. So if you go to city forward website, parks and community services page and then click on master plans at the top. It's a link at the top left of the page there. You have access to all those documents. I put my email address on here. Feel free to contact me. It's also at the top of the blue sheet. So you've already filled out a survey and you just want to take one of those blue sheets for the contact information. Feel free to do that.


her demeanor for this is completely wrong. I asked them multiple times to cut off the zip tie because my hand was like turning blue like my hand it was cut off and they wouldn't do it. She's supposed to be talking about something that's given her PTSD, something that's been very traumatic and she's smiling she's laughing.  She's trying to bond with these guys and trying to make trying to make like she's one of them and she understands what's happening and what's going on. I would understand being relaxed in another situation but not in this one from the get-go you see this and go something's not right here and you know these guys had to see that too and I think you can tell they've sort of got the shits and giggles because they're so upbeat with it all they're like we got this they're probably thinking I can't believe she's doing this like this I don't know how much they know already about her they know enough by watching her in this situation that's enough to know that something's not right here.


So it's pretty discouraging to think that people in my generation, millennials, Gen Zers, we are faced with the reality that when we are older, we probably won't ever be able to retire.  It's just not going to be a possibility, it seems. And you know, there's a lot of people that share the same sentiment because a new poll released showed that almost 25% of people, nearly one in four people, they also think, yeah, they're probably never going to be able to retire. I mean, the previous generation, they would dream about what they're going to do when they retire.  I don't know. But I mean, this is something that we're dealing with, like this is unique to our generation because we're reaching late stage capitalism where it nears its final conclusion. You know, it, it hollows out the state. It corrodes democracy and now it exploits people until the very day that they die. There's just no rest for them. So you can't read this poll and come away thinking, oh wow, isn't capitalism amazing? Because I mean, this isn't like a flaw of capitalism. This is a feature of capitalism and you can try to fix it and course correct. That's what I think the new deal did.  So a normal person who sees a poll like this where one in four Americans nearly don't think they're ever going to be able to retire, you'd think, man, this really makes capitalism look bad. But if your Fox News, the way that they covered it, completely hilarious, they actually tried to spin it. And rather than make it seem like people working until they die is a really bad thing. They tried to convince you that it's actually awesome. Not even kidding. Not even kidding. Let's watch. Well, retirement inching closer to becoming a thing in the past for a lot of Americans. In fact, a recent poll finds nearly one in four people don't expect to ever leave the workforce. This, as a number of people working multiple jobs, also spiking. So why are so many people financially unfit to call it quits? Well, it's up for debate. So let's ask Trin Micro CIO, Donald Luskin, you know, these kind of polls are already always around, right? The bank rate does some things and other folks, but it's always alarming. 32% of people say they were tied before 865, which might be unrealistic, but 23% said never. Is that worrisome for you, Donald? Doesn't worry me personally. I guess I'm one of those people who plans never to retire. I mean, I gotta tell you, what do people do when they retire? How do you spend a day? I mean, is bowling that interesting? Is fishing that interesting? I mean, I happen to love my work. Why do I want to stop it?  Why would I stop it? This is great. What a great country where we have the opportunity to keep working. What a miracle where our lives are long enough and we're healthy enough and mentally alert enough so that we don't have to retire like generations before us. This is a great blessing. You should embrace it. This is why you don't try to defend capitalism because you end up looking so foolish. This reminds me of Kirsten Gillibrand's line at the Democratic debate. I'm gonna paraphrase here, but she said something to the effect of, well look, there's a difference between capitalism and cronyism. No, there really isn't. It's an oxymoron. Capitalism is inherently cronyism. It's literally working exactly as it was designed to. I mean, this isn't surprising, but the people who benefit from capitalism, the few people who benefit, they have to do things like this.  And thankfully, John Whitehouse on Twitter, he transcribed this, so I don't have to. I want to read through it again. This may seem redundant, but I have to go through what he said because it's so ridiculous. I'm honestly having trouble wrapping my head around what he said. It's that laughable. It doesn't worry me personally if people have to work until they die or one in four people feel as if they're never going to be able to retire. It doesn't worry me personally. I guess I'm one of those people who plans never to retire. I mean, I got to tell you, what do people do when they retire? You know, how do you spend a day? I mean, is bowling that interesting? Is fishing that interesting? I happen to love my work. Why do I want to stop it? It's not like it hurts. Why do I stop it? This is great. What a great country where we have the opportunity to keep working. I love how the underlying assumption is that people are choosing to work until the day that they die. It's not because, you know, they have no choice.  This is the assumption here. That's the assumption. How detached from reality are you? The normal American does not like their job, or even if they do like their job, they're still overworked. Like, you can enjoy your job, but be overworked. He doesn't get that. He's so detached, but he's a corporate executive. So to him, you know, exploiting workers is exactly what he has to do in order to increase profits for his company. So he has to promote this idea. He literally has a vested interest in getting us peasants to think, well, you know, working until we die is good. But there's more here. What a miracle where our lives are long enough and we're healthy enough and mentally alert enough so we don't have to retire like generations before us. This is a great blessing. You should embrace it. Wow. Why do you think more and more people are warming up to the idea of socialism? It's because capitalism has been exposed. We keep making tweaks to capitalism, you know, make it a little less rough around the edges so it works fairly well and, you know, we can at least live fairly good lives and get by. But capitalism does what it is designed to do. Take over everything, commodify everything. The New Deal era is over. A lot of people say that the New Deal saved capitalism. And I think that that's persuasive to an extent. But the New Deal era is over. It's been undone. The New Deal reforms have been undone. And if we get a president, Bernie Sanders, and you know, we do all of these things to reform capitalism, we'll all kind of forget about what capitalism is and why it's so problematic and harmful to our lives. But decades later, it's going to take over again and again and again because capitalism is like a virus. It corrupts everything it touches. Or to a point in American politics where capitalism has literally corrupted the democratic process itself. It corrupted democracy. Now if you want to get elected, you have to raise money and sell out to the capitalist forces. Capitalism ruins everything it touches. So this is why more and more I just can't even justify being a social democrat. If you don't end the threat of capitalism and eliminate it entirely, then you're just going to be back to the same situation where every couple of generations we're going to have to reform capitalism, but it's only going to be a temporary, you know, period of reform until once again it takes over and corrupts everything it touches again. There's got to be a better way for us to create this economic system to where we're not incentivized to literally destroy the planet and exploit people until the day they die. Like capitalism has one goal, one goal, and that is to make everything about money. That means you exploit workers and milk everything you possibly can out of them until there's nothing left until they are dead. And now you have clowns going on Fox News trying to rationalize that and sell it to us as if it's a good thing.    And you know it's a joke when you have people now trying to convince you that it's really good that you're never going to be able to retire. See the difference between that guy and you is that he actually does have the choice. He can choose to make the choice to not retire because he has enough money to get by and to actually retire. But you don't have a choice. You may like work, but if you choose to retire someday, you may not have that chance. A lot of people don't believe that they're going to have that chance. And that's sad because our lives are short. So we shouldn't only be focusing on work and making money and getting exploited. We should be able to pursue our passions, travel, sculpt. I don't know. Play video games. New things that make us happy. Pet dogs. Our lives shouldn't just be driven by the need to increase money for our employer. It's not right. It's not fair. And I'm glad that people are finally starting to wake up to this and realize that it's the system. It's flawed. Capitalism is flawed. This clip is just, it's brilliant to me because it really shows how they're running out of arguments. They can't sell capitalism to young people anymore because this is what they have to resort to. They just look silly. And it's sad for them. You know, I feel bad for them because good luck. You're not going to keep convincing people to be in favor of an economic system that is killing them and killing the planet. It's just, it's not going to work. It's why people are moving away from capitalism and inching closer and closer towards socialism.  It's a killer. You could support the Humanist Report at patreon.com slash humanistreport. But trust me, I'd have way more supporters on Patreon if that was my podcast. Sad.


Hi everyone, thanks to the organizers for accepting our talk. And today I would like, I'm very glad that I came just right after Maria Liz, because we're going to talk about the same type of sides, rock up tombs, but from two completely different points of view that I think can complete each other. So why the title, Digging Where Nature has already dug, because the area that we're going to focus today is central Italy. And central Italy, in central Italy, nature really has dug a lot. So the landscape is really characterized by caves. There are at least 150 known caves that have wrong age archaeological prisons, most of which are burial sites. So there's plenty of these features in the landscape, but even though there are so many caves, there is also a parallel phenomenon, which is rock up tombs. So they are mostly present in, well, it's a much smaller phenomenon, and it's focused in the central area, central Tyrian area of Italy, which we could define as southern atria. I know that it's much, it's an earlier time, but geographically it's north of the Tiber River, so we can define it as southern Etruscan area. And there are almost 20 known rock up tombs sites in there. There are some also in southern Italy, in the Puglia region. And today we're going to also deal with a new site that has been recently discovered and we are going, we are investigated with my team, which is in southern Lazio, so it's far away from the other two concentration areas. So these rock up tombs are very typical shape. The shape is similar to what Maria Liz described before. So there's a corridor, it's an open corridor with two walls at the sides, it's called dramos. And then there's a small entrance that can be covered or open. And then there's the proper hypogeum structure, which is usually a burial chamber. So these have been divided by shape, so the chamber can be square shaped or can be round shaped. And, but basically it's almost the same. So these are very close to one another, those there doesn't seem to be a different treatment in the shape because these are also present in the same site. So there might be a quadangular or a round shape chamber in the same site. And these are from southern Italy. So what's the interesting aspect of this structure that have been universally interpreted like this at least for central Italy? We have the external part, the dramos, the corridor where offerings have mainly been found. So pods with, for example, seeds or animal offering or artifacts and so on. So some kind of preliminary ceremonial practice going on there. And inside the hypogeum we found the funerary area. So the human bones basically. So there is this kind of spatial distinction that it's very interesting to see that we found also in caves and some caves that are contemporary. So in the Bronze Age cave, for example, this is one that we are investigating in southern Nazi as well. And Dr. Angela Margherita, where we find in the entrance area, the one that is illuminated, we found some kind of preparatory ritual practices with herds and animal sacrifices and so on. Whereas in the darkest innermost part of the cave, we find only the burials, the human burials. And this is interesting because it shows how similarities, burial practices are to one another. Another interesting feature is that we often find some kind of division of separation between the world of the dead and the world of the living where there are stone walls or big slabs that close the chamber, the burial chamber. And that can be reopened every time that a new burial must be inserted because these are mostly multiple tombs, just not individual tombs. So it is a way probably to separate the world of the dead from the world of the living. And this again happens not just in rocker tombs but also in caves, in burial caves. Since the Neolithic, we see it in the Neolithic, we see it in the Copper Age and we also see it in the Bronze Age. This is the Nuke studies, the Nuke study that we are now really focusing on. It's in southern Naxu, so you see it's far away from the southern Traskan area. It's almost 200 kilometers away, 300 kilometers. And there are, it was first discovered in the 1980s but it was never systematically investigated. We went there just once in 2009 and then two years ago there was this campaign where we cleaned the area and tried to refind the places. So this is what we found. Two rocker tombs, that's before and after the cleaning, with this very typical shape. And this is the other one. There might be more than these but that's what we found so far. How can we tell that these are rocker tombs that are tombs because we didn't find any human bones actually. But the shape, the structure is so similar to those that we have found in the northern part of Lazio and southern Tuscany and in Puglia that there aren't really any other types of structures known for different purposes in this area. And also we found a lot of pottery fragments that are referred to that period to the Bronze Age. So we concluded that these must have been tombs. And the fact that we didn't find anything is really important to the site itself because it shows how many times it was reused, it interacted with people, with communities at different times. This type of rock is very, it was very often used for construction in the surroundings so it's called peperino rock and actually in Roman medieval period, this area was used as a quarry so we found the remains of a quarry and it's possible that other rocker tombs were destroyed by this phenomenon. Then at a later time that we cannot really locate now we found this cross, it's a cross of Jerusalem carved on top of one of these two rocker tombs that indicates the presence of probably an Eastern Christian cult that it's not surprising because even if it's rare to find something like this in this area of Italy, there's in a closed village which is called Grotta Ferrata, there's actually an Orthodox church that is really unique case in that area but could be related somehow. So this kind of cult existed at the time that we cannot really say. And then there was a frequent in occupation also during the time of the unification of Italy. In 1861 we found some coins and finally during World War II this area was used as a soldier shelter. We found several bullets from World War II, we found several remains from the Germany and the German and the Allied armies. So this is why I mean this landscape interacted so much for so long with human communities that we cannot really find any trace of the original occupation. So going back to concrete, going back to our first question, so why digging where nature has rained out? So these excavating and producing these rocker tombs requires a lot of energy expenditure because peperino rock in particular, it's not a soft rock to cut or to work. But at the same time, caves, natural caves that were used for the same purposes are very, very close to all these sites, especially in the southern Etruria area. So there are five kilometers away from these rocker tombs there are natural caves that are burial caves. And also in this area where we are digging, then we are investigating now. There are 20, 30 kilometers away, there are natural tombs and natural caves. So the question is why would you dig, why would you excavate and put so much effort when you could use caves? So the first hypothesis, most practical one that relates a bit with what Marianis was saying before that the geographical constraint might be that since the cultural roots of burrowing in caves was so strong that people didn't want to move so far away and they prefer to build their tombs maybe next to the villages that we don't know about, unfortunately. But really this is a bit stretched out as an hypothesis because caves are so close, especially in the Tuscany area that it's not really a valid explanation. So the other hypothesis is that there was a meaning to this high energy expenditure, some kind of will to signal the importance either of the buried or of the community that was burying the family or the person that was dead. So there is a very strong symbolic meaning behind the construction of these rocker tombs. And this is also demonstrated even though in Caledegro Tisciale we couldn't find any kind of remain in the few cases where those kind of tombs were untouched, we found very rich great goods inside the tombs basically. So this might indicate really a will to signal the importance either of the buried or of the community that wanted to give this message. And this is another case, a very striking case example that I chose to put in here even if it's not a rocker tomb, it's a proper cave, natural cave in southern Italy that was a burial cave, but there also were some rock cut areas. So the cave that was big enough was continue to be dug excavated and there were special burials put inside those artificially excavated little caves inside the caves and then they were covered with these kind of stone walls. So when it was excavated, the walls were removed and inside there were these untouched burials with swords, with metal work that is rare to find in burial caves. So this really indicates how much effort it was put maybe to signal the importance of the person buried and the strong symbolic importance of rock cut sites and rock cut tombs inside. Thank you.


In the last class we had seen that what is the value of N for which the propellant will operate stably right in all the analysis that we had looked at till the last class we had looked at basically determining the burn rate in a strand burner or a Crawford bomb right now rocket motor depending on its application if it is in a tactical missile or a launch vehicle can be very very large compared to what you do in a strand burner right strand burner you essentially take a few grams of propellant and measure the burn rate now in today's class let us look at what are the parameters that are going to change when we go from this small strand burner test to the actual motor and how do we account for it in some sense okay firstly if you remember I had written that burn rate r. is a function of chamber pressure initial temperature cross flow velocity and composition this part of what cross flow velocity we are going to look at it in a little more detail this is going to cause what is known as erosive burning that is if you have a rocket motor whose port diameter is quite close to the throat diameter then it is going to be subjected to erosive burning we will discuss that a little later in the course so this is one part we will not be able to measure in our strand burner test okay so the first thing that we are not able to look at in a strand burner test is erosive burning okay that is going to be different in actual motor compared to this there are some small motors which are spun at some high rpm in order to make them go straight okay these are probably in tactical applications only tactical missiles only they are spun at a high rate so that they go straight now what happens in such a case especially in an aluminized propellant is these aluminum particles are subjected to a centrifugal force so they tend to burn much closer to the surface so therefore the burn rate increases strand burner you do not have that so that is something that you have to account for okay then what are the other things that you think will change from the small strand burner to the actual motor chamber pressure you can essentially hold it the same as the what is going to be there in the large rocket motor that is not something that is bound to change yes G loads but that is not going to be large in both strategic missiles and launch vehicles because if you look at it their accelerations go from somewhere around 1.6 to 4 G's they could be of significance in tactical missiles these come on because they are subjected to enormous accelerations right then as a consequence of this and also if you look at the entire missile or launch vehicle it is a large mass of propellant right there are regions which are subjected to strain because of its own weight those things not been kind of included in our tests in the Crawford bomb right so effect of right so these are the things that change from our Crawford bomb test to the actual test typically it is seen that the burn rate variation from Crawford bomb test to an actual test is somewhere around less than 10% somewhere around 8 to 7 to 8% it is still vital primarily because if you look at the GSLV kind of configuration or the Arian 5 kind of configuration or the space shuttle you have two large solid rocket motors right now if they do not complete combustion at the same time you are going to have a tremendous side force which could topple the entire vehicle okay which is something that is not desirable or you need to have a tremendous control force to overcome this which is also not easy to overcome because the thrust produced by this motor the very very large okay so that is something that is very important to note that there are changes to burn rate from the stand test Crawford bomb test or the strand burner test to the actual motor and the there are kind of thumb rules to tell us what is this difference going to be people with experience will know that if they conduct the burn rate in a Crawford bomb and then as an intermediate you have something known as a ballistic evaluation motor and then the actual motor so if you have the data for all these three then depending on the Crawford bomb test you can then what they do is while making the propellant they take a portion of the slurry and get the burn rate of the slurry and if the burn rate is different then they add the suitable burn rate modifiers to get it back to the level that they wanted to be so that they know what is a priori before they cast what is the burn rate right as I said in some tactical missile applications if you wanted to go straight that's been stabilized you know bullet, bullet is spun at tremendous rate so as to go make it go straight otherwise aerodynamic loads will make it go in a different direction right so you wanted to go straight then you need to spin it it is called as gyroscopic stabilization that is if you still spin at some very high rates the shells are spun at something like 18,000 rpm if you spin it at that rate this is like a cycle wheel as long as you are peddling it you won't fall off right even if there is a force that tends to destabilize you right if you look at the cycle it is like an inverted pendulum you can model it as an inverted pendulum it is a mass that is there at some height right and inverted pendulum is you know is very unstable small disturbance can make it change its stability so there what you do is you spin the wheel so that you get that stability unless you are moving forward you cannot stabilize yourself right so in the same way if you spin it you can then make it go straight and coming back to the topic we had also looked at certain equations for pressure in the last class right we had said that the chamber pressure PC is given by now we can also add thrust define thrust in a similar manner right we can use thrust we knew was F is equal to CF PC 80 right so now if you use this definition for PC here you will get F is equal to CF ropey okay so this sorry this has to be 80 is this is plus 1 this has to be minus okay because this is in the denominator so which you can simplify as so F you can define it in this fashion right we also know that a the term a has embedded in it the temperature sensitivity part right so we can use that we knew that a was a 0 into exponential of okay so if we plug that into this equation and this equation we will get the variation of chamber pressure and thrust why are we doing all this let us try and estimate if there is a marginal change to let us say the burning surface area or the throat area or changes in temperature what is going to be the effect on thrust and chamber pressure okay why is this important first thrust part I kind of explained it in a sense if you are looking at the launch vehicle part you do not want the thrust to be different in the two motors that is J cell V class motors even otherwise you the entire launch vehicle if you take a look at it it should take the satellite to the required orbit height and it should give it the required velocity if there is a shortfall in some cases they do use some liquid engines to take care of that okay but if you are looking at a missile then again you have this problem that even though temperatures are varying widely you still want to be able to hit a particular target right so you need the thrust to be estimated appropriately then if you look at the chamber pressure part the if you look at all aerospace systems the factor of safety is going to be very small right it somewhere around 1.6 to 2.2 so if your factor of safety is very small then your margins are also very very small right due to changes in temperature if the pressure exceeds by a large fraction then you could have the motor bursting out right you would not want that to happen so we need to have some estimate of what is going to be the change to pressure and thrust if there are small changes to burning surface area or throat area and temperature okay so that is the reason we are trying to plug in all this into this equation so if you plug in the a variation also you will get PC into exponential of and similarly F will also have you can expand a in terms of this so F will be so we have included all the variations of AB AT and initial temperature right so let us now do something known as an incremental analysis wherein we will see if there are small changes to the either AB AT or initial temperature what will be the corresponding change in terms of chamber pressure and thrust how do you do this very simple take a partial derivative right if you are looking for burning surface area take a partial derivative of chamber pressure or thrust with respect to the burning surface area so let us do that and PC with respect to AB AT and initial temperature okay so what is the with respect to let us take firstly AB what is the variation of AB with respect to or what is the variation of PC with respect to AB so we get do PC by if I take PC if I divided by PC this is the same as AB appears in the same fashion in both these equations right so the partial derivatives will be the same if I take the partial derivative and divided by the actual value then I will get the incremental change so this will be the same as ? F by F is equal to your 1 by 1-n into and if you look at AT again AT appears in the denominator here and it has a different sign different power here so this is with respect to AB then for AT these two will not be the same so here it AT is in the denominator so it will have a negative sign and lastly if we look at how these two change with initial temperature okay I will call TIN-TIN0 as ? TIN okay then both of them change in the same fashion if you look at this both of them are raised to the exponential of this value so both of them will change in the same fashion so you will get okay so we have been able to look at what is the incremental change to chamber pressure and thrust in terms of changes to burning surface area throat area and temperature now let us look at how each one of these will vary if you look at burning surface area right burning surface area is the area that is seen by the flame now if you look at a rocket motor this propellant can be extruded or cast okay either process you will have some kind of imperfections that is you will have somewhere cracks blow holes right so now if the flame comes to this position right let us say the position is somewhere here or if it is somewhere here it sees an additional surface area right suddenly an additional surface area is exposed to the flame okay so the burning surface area changes because of imperfections in the manufacturing process these could be you know propellants are made in one place and then move to another place to the launch pad right so during the transportation it could the damage could get could be accentuated that is it could be increased and also if you are looking at higher stages having a solid rocket motor due to the enormous vibrational loads that come on the propellant while it the first stage is burning let us say then the these imperfections could also be increased there okay so we now know how burning surface area will change how do you think the throat area will change due to erosion of the nozzle you could also have deposit okay if it is a heavily aluminized propellant in some cases it is seen to have a deposition also okay so either case is possible erosion of throat and as well as deposition basically mean most cases it is erosion is the more predominant from phenomena okay typically this throat erosion or deposition is a function of the burn time if you have a large burn time right then you could have something like 8 to 10% increase in the throat area if the throat area increases in the pressure will drop okay and you are also in a sense reducing the area ratio for the supersonic portion right so it hits you in two ways one is drop in pressure and then the ISP will change because of drop in pressure one and then again because of the expansion ratio being changed okay the burning surface area changes if you know if you are trying to make a large rocket motor let us say of the class of GSLV Mach 3 the first stage which is a 200 ton propellant okay as I said it is very difficult to make propellants without imperfections right there will be some amount of blow holes some amount of cracks and things so what they do is they do detailed non-destructive testing that is they take ultrasound images of the propellant and study it and find out where the imperfections are how large are these imperfections okay so which is what makes it very very expensive because if you have to do the entire rocket motor test it right it takes a lot of effort and time and you also need those kind of facilities to make once the entire rocket motor has been made and the reason why in one sense they make a segmented grain is let us say you are casting 200 motors in one go if you make the entire motor and if you realize that the imperfections are only in certain portion then you have to redo the entire 200 tons right so it would be better if you can make it in smaller segments so that you know you can take out the portion that is bad and then replace only that portion and but if you have also too many segments then your reliability in some sense goes down and you are also exposing it to in some sense combustion instabilities because you will have some protrusions coming in because of the liner and that is something that you also want so it is in a sense given take between these two right now lastly how much does the temperature vary the initial temperature initial temperature varies from place to place and also daily variation and seasonal variation even in a single place depending on the season temperatures can vary and depending on the time of the day temperatures can vary one good thing for us is most of the solid propellants are very bad conductors of heat okay so it takes them long time to really sense what is happening on the outside so typically take something like depending on the size of the web thickness take something like 24 to 72 hours to soak the propellant that is if the ambient temperature changes let us say from 27 degrees to something like 0 and if it is there in that condition for a very long time only the entire propellant go to that temperature otherwise you will have a gradient even in the propellant okay so now we have kind of got these equations let us linearize them in a or let us take a small variation in a B okay these are nonlinear variations let us take a small variation in a B linearize these equations and find out what is the change in pressure and trust okay so if you do that I have taken two cases wherein one has a small sigma one as a large sigma I will also take for each one of them what happens when n is small and when n is large okay just one important thing if you look at the sign of these incremental changes both changes to burning surface area and initial temperature have a positive sign okay whereas the changes with respect to throat area have a negative sign now as I said also we will take two cases for n n being small n being large this is incremental change in burn rate and correspondingly incremental change in the burn time we know that changes in pressure and burn rate are related I dot is equal to a PC to the power of n so we use that to we can use that to calculate this and if you know the burn rate you can also calculate the burn time now if you notice this as I said earlier this sign of this will be different from the other two right so all this is with minus sign whereas all this is with plus sign so the changes in burn time will be the negative of the changes in burn rate right so notice that the worst case would be if you have a large sigma and a large n then your changes to chamber pressure with 10 degrees change in ambient pressure can be of the order of 26% right which is pretty significant and thrust will also change by the same margin okay so in a sense it is very important to have propellants that have low n and low sigma p right but what do we do if we cannot have them there is something that we want sometimes we are not in a position to be able to achieve that okay so what is the next big thing that we can do as an engineer only thing is try and control it in some fashion right as I said earlier if you look at this throat area is in a has a negative sign compared to the other changes right one way to look at it is if you cannot have a propellant with low n and low sigma if you look back you will find that homogeneous propellants are always are going to have higher n and higher sigma right compared to composite propellants so if you have such propellants which are mostly going to be used in tactical missiles what do you do you can look at this and in some sense if you can change the throat area depending on the condition then you will be able to achieve or you will be able to minimize the changes in initial temperature because this has a negative sign and that is what is done in certain missile applications you will have a plug so if you have a plug like this whose diameter changes from one end to another that is you use a cone and if you are trading this in some fashion then you can move it in or out depending on what is the requirement right so you will be essentially changing the throat area to accommodate for changes in the initial temperature right the other way to overcome this is let us say we are in a position to store these missiles in a controlled environment okay and as I said earlier these are very poor conductors of heat so it will take them a long time to soak to the ambient temperature so if you can maintain some of these missiles in controlled environment then and you are able to use it in the next couple of bars let us say then these effects won't take too much of a toll right so one way is to have a best is to have a low n and low sigma p if that is not possible then have something where in the throat area is changing this cannot be a solution for a large missile application primarily because this plug is exposed to high temperature gases and if the burn time is very large it will tend to burn itself out which again will dramatically change things you won't want that either so these are applicable only for small tactical missiles with small burn times okay not for large boosters or missiles and as I said if you cannot do this either then the only way is to store it at a controlled environment store it at in a controlled environment these are not possible for very large rocket motors also large missiles you cannot have them stored in a controlled environment and then be able to move it to the launch pad within a very short time so what is done in such cases is you will have a small liquid rocket motor attached to the payload which will make up for any loss in thrust which you can cut off at any stage okay so that is what is done in missile applications in order to overcome this problem those small liquid rocket motors are called as velocity termination packages okay so if you do not have the required velocity at the end of it that will make up for it by burning for a short time okay so in the next class we look at how to go about designing a grain of a solid rocket motor okay what are the things that we need to keep in mind how do we get the required thrust time curve if we know a propellant has certain burn rate and other thing okay so we will meet in the next class thank you.


This week the fossil fuel crisis has continued. We are still without fossil fuels or just running out of what we had available. So we can't go to the grocery stores easily and there's nothing fresh in the produce section so we're basically buying stuff that is staples, dried, made already. Other than that people are just starting to hunker down, starting to grow things in their gardens which makes it tougher to get supplies for gardening which is good and bad. I mean it's good that people are planning and making gardens, that's wonderful. But it stinks for me because I've been trying to get different materials and things and they're running out which is honestly fine. We have everything we need at this point but it's always nice to build up a little more. So anyway thanks for joining us this week, we're going to look at a couple different projects. I pressed my cheese, we have a lot of starts in the greenhouse so we'll keep an eye on those. We're building a lot of beds and I planted a whole bunch of flax. So we'll see those and a couple other things on this episode of Foodmageddon. Thanks for tuning in. So the first thing we're going to look at is cheese. As I said last time cheese is a great way to save excess dairy from pre-industrial times and I guess we enjoy it now as well. But I wanted to get practice with whatever milk we have available in the grocery store so that when I am able to find a neighbor with cows I can make large amounts of cheese successfully. So I am continuing my practice with cheese making and this week I pressed my cheese into a round and then I waxed it. Now it's time to pop the cheese out of the mold. So I had a bit of a problem with this cheese and when I was in the curd heating stage I let it get too warm. I let it get over 100 degrees, it was like up to 105. It made the curds really seem like they were melted rather than kind of sticking and forming together and in most of the cheddar cheese videos I've seen online people are able to crumble the cheese before they put it in the mold and I was never able to do that it was still kind of like a half melted cheese. So this might be too soft to press and it might not actually survive the aging process but we'll give it a go and see what happens. And cross our fingers that it will be a survivable cheese for all involved. Actually this was a Jerry rake throw together cheese mold and once I've done it a few times I'll build something a little more permanent but for the first time let's see how our cheese looks. So it's actually firmer than I expected so that's good. It's got some discoloration from the pan. Looks like a cheese. So now what has to happen is it has to sit on a rack in room temperature for one to three days for the skin and rind to develop and every day I'll flip it but otherwise it just sits here like a cheese. So after three days of drying I coated the cheese in paraffin and the outside had gotten pretty dry and formed like a rind and then this paraffin wax should keep any moisture that's left in there in and all the bad microorganisms out at least that's the hope. I labeled it dipped in paraffin wax and yeah it's actually a pretty satisfying process. So peels aren't available trying to make a schedule for myself and one of the big things for me is Friday is kind of clean up the house day but it's also maintenance of the fence and other infrastructure around the garden so that's what I'm up to today. One of the big problems is that vegetation grows up underneath the fence and when the vegetation touches the electric fence it shorts it out and drains the battery. Not only that it reduces the amount of charge available to keep rabbits, raccoons and deer out of the garden. So every week I go on and I hoe up any vegetable matter that's growing up underneath the fence. I start so on so I can get them out of the house because they're kind of crowding the back window and you know Lauren would like to have her dining area back. I've only been waiting for two years to have a functioning greenhouse and I finally do getting all these out of the house and into where they belong. This is pretty exciting. In addition to working on the greenhouse I've also been continuing to make garden beds. It's still the never ending process in the spring because we have to get all the cardboard out, all the mulch out, source all of the compost and everything else that we need to do. So it's been busy and it's been extra hard because we have less gasoline available. So this month I basically have one tank of gas for my truck to get all the mulch, all the compost, all the cardboard, everything I need for the garden this month I only have one tank to get it with. I have no idea how much gas I'm going to have next month if all this continues.   Today we are out here to get some beds ready for the peas. Peas are sprouted, they're coming up, they're ready to be transplanted soon so I got to whip these beds into shape. So let's do a quick discussion of what I have here and the point of doing all this of course is to keep my weed load down. It also builds soil. I'm not churning it up. This is called no dig gardening. If I turn it up and I destroy everything that's in it, it also breaks down the microbes and the microbial life, the fungal life, all the things that make soil get disturbed when you deep till it. That's why I'm doing this no dig method where I cover everything up and mulch it. Over years I'm building up more and more soil. I have a foot of deep soil here and that's because I've been doing this for three years now. As I said, this is year three of no dig gardening. So let's just have a look. So these are cilia, these grow all, they're kind of invasive. They grow all over the neighborhood. But if we go down a bit farther, we see we have pretty good soil all the way down. And a lot of this is originally clay but because we just pile on more organic matter every year and smother it, we're really able to keep the organic content high. And even though I'm putting cardboard on it, I'm going to plant through the cardboard. So this is the medium I'm going to be planting into. And as I'm hoeing this all together to prepare the bed for the year, I get any incipient invasives that I see. I saw some wild parsnip over there and some others. So I try and prepare it as much as I can before covering it up. Each year, there's a less and less weed load. I'll see if I can rustle up a picture of what this looked like before. It was completely grown over with invasive trees and brush. All of this that I'm putting on will break down and become soil next year. And so I have my two pathways. I've got my cardboard covered by straw. And if we move over here, you can see how we're making it. So we've got a bed covered by cardboard. These are the sides of the bed pushed off to the side. This will be a pathway. It's going to be filled with mulch. And then this is the next bed that hasn't been worked yet. I'm going to pull last year's pathway onto it that's rotted now. Cover it with cardboard, cover it with straw, put the sides on. And it will be a good bed just like all the rest of them. It's a lot of success, actually. One of the things we try and do at the Los Angeles Institute is figure out how to house clothing feed ourselves without fossil fuels. Food is obviously the one I'm really concentrated on this year. But sometimes I feel like I don't give enough shrift to clothing. And so my goal last year was growing in a flax to make myself a shirt. And I'm still in the process of processing that flax. But this year, I'm going to grow flax for the seed. But I'm going to use that same flax seed that I grew last year. I got a half a pound of avian flax. And this year, I'm going to grow two pounds of avian flax, which is what I got from last year. So I've got that here in the cart. I'm going to clean up this area and then put the flax in. Luckily, flax requires less preparation of the ground than everything else, because flax grows so prolifically it locks out all of the weeds. So it's a great kind of cover crop for me and real easy and fun to grow. So now, after getting most of the overburden off this triangular plot here, now I'm going to just scrape the surface a little bit with this wheel hoe so that I can create the rows in which I will be planting the flax seed. I'm not really digging deep. I don't want to disturb the soil too much. But I do need to break up just this surface area. Number one, to get the seeds in. And number two, to get this light vegetation on top and disrupt it so that when the seeds emerge, they can quickly overtop and out-compete the weeds that are here. So in the pre-industrial world, draft animals were really, really important because they could plow up a lot faster than I could. And I'm not even plowing. I'm just scratching the surface. An acre is originally defined as the amount of space a man and a horse could plow in a day. Obviously, doing an acre like this would take me a very, very long time, a couple of days, three days, four days. I don't know. I don't want to find out. It would blow out my elbows. I have to adjust this so it's a little less stressful on my elbows. But now, without fossil fuels, draft animals would be really important. I don't know if it would be possible maybe next year to talk to some of my neighbors. There's horses within riding distance up here. I can't imagine they've ever been used as draft animals, but it would be interesting to talk to the owners about possibly plowing this all, maybe not plowing, but scratching this all up for me next year just to save me days of work, freeing me up to do other things. And in exchange, I could give them food or something like that. That's the sort of thing we have to start thinking about now that we don't have easy access to fossil fuels to run our rototillers and our other tools that usually make quick work of what is actually pretty slow work when you don't have the embodied energy in fossil fuels available. Oranges aren't actually my favorite fruit. They're actually really like apples. The thing is right now, oranges were available at our supermarket. We're starting to see majors to disruptions in what we can buy. So the produce section is pretty ghostly. There's really not much in terms of lettuce, hot peppers. Anything that needs to be shipped quickly, it's not there. Oranges are actually really ecologically friendly because they can be grown and ripened on the tree and then shipped slowly because they have a long shelf life. Same thing with apples. They are out of season right now, so a lot of our apples in the spring come from south of the equator, so there aren't that many available right now, but come the fall, there should be a lot. They can be shipped on trains and other slow moving. Very efficient transportation methods. So I'm eating oranges now, that's fine. I'm looking forward to apple season though. One way that you can kind of look at what collapses in the loss of fossil fuels is the carbon footprint. And so I'll link to a talk I gave. I'll actually put it out as a podcast at our recent gardening expo where I talked about the carbon cost of growing different plants. And really what I'm showing people is how carbon intensive it is to grow things like asparagus off season or lettuce off season. Really the main takeaway though is buy in season, buy locally. And yeah, you're not gonna get lettuce in the middle of winter, but that's fine. You'll enjoy it more in the spring. We're really looking forward to salad season which should be starting here soon. So yeah, I'll link to that and you can have a listen. You can also find other similar lectures like on the history of gardening and other things. If you go to your favorite podcast app and look for low tech lecture series. That's low tech lecture series. I'll link to it below here on the YouTube page, but it's available on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, all these different places. And there's all kinds of interesting, I hope, lectures there that I've given over time. So check that out and I don't know, enjoy oranges and other things while we have them.  They got a little bit of surface mold. So I washed them with hydrogen peroxide. They turned against them and they never dried out completely. So my seeder didn't work. I had to broadcast them. So what I did is I really walked back and forth and my hand spread out the seeds as evenly as I could. So now I'm just gonna rake them in and trample them down. Pretty low tech. So just behind my flax field over here, I've got my potatoes. This is one of a few potato fields I'm making. And the idea here, right now there's piles of straw, but what I'm gonna do, I already have some rows that I've dug in with the real hope. And what I'm gonna do now is put the straw down between the rows and that is hoping to smother the incipient growth that we have here. Leave the rows open. I'll plant the potatoes, put down compost, turn them all together, and then as the potatoes grow up, I will move this mulch over on top of the potatoes to hill them up. I grow my potatoes on the surface. And the reason I do that is because I conducted a study with 10 market gardeners in Southern Wisconsin. And we tried all kinds of different methods, five to be exact, different methods of growing potatoes, growing them on the surface under straw mulch, under newspaper and straw mulch, digging them in, hilling them up like traditionally, growing them in potato towers, and also growing them in grow bags. And we found that planting them on the surface is probably your best bet if you have space because it takes the least amount of energy for you to dig up each pound of potatoes on a per pound basis, planting them on the surfaces, half as much work as digging them into the ground while it is only a small percentage, less productive in terms of tubers per square foot. So I am a whole video about this, and I will link to that here. You can check that out if you're interested in learning more about the potato study that we did. But suffice it to say, we plant on the surface with some compost and mulch. Well, that's all we have for this week.  You can find a video of that on the Lotech Institute YouTube page under our other videos, the Lotech video series. So maybe I'll link to that right here. So have a look at that and see some of the other work we're doing around the institutes. Be sure to check back next week because we'll be planting potatoes and doing a whole bunch more in the garden and in the kitchen. Subscribe to make sure that you get each of our episodes as they come out, and please consider liking the video and sharing it with a friend. We really appreciate it. Next week, I hope to also get a podcast out, or at least in the next couple of weeks. You can find that under the Lotech podcast on most of the major podcast carriers. You can also reach out directly at Scott at LotechInstitute.org. And I hope you're all staying safe out there. Thanks for joining us and take care.


What's good Josh the boy Ross back again with another video, so we're gonna check out Rick Flair's greatest flops compilation You know this is about to be straight comical if there's anybody in wrestling That has the best flops out there the best quote-unquote selling you want to say Rick Flair's one of those guys man. I like he he's the one person That will take some punishment and in seconds after finally fall this is gonna be good This is gonna be great. Appreciate all the love and support, bro. Oh, man. Let's let's get right into this one I'm ready to see this one Oh My god, but what He does the same thing Oh my god, bro And he falls the same way every single time But I love this Rick Flair. I know he's in some hot water right now, but we cannot deny Do was entertaining in the ring. Oh, oh, he falls the exact same way.  Oh Man, I'm thirsty. I mean oh This is This is so funny to me both. Oh my god We've seen this clip in my previous video I just uploaded with the greatest chops in history We know it's about to happen here. I put them up. Oh, I see them chops will make me fall to old. Oh my god Oh my god, Jesus Yep, yep, right there. That's the clip. He's been doing this for so long and it still somehow works I guess it is one of those comedic sections in the match where you you can't help but laugh, bro Granny kind of takes you out of it, but it's just it's wrestling. That's all I can say That was great, bro, I love this video this video is great I it was short sweet straight to the point man This should be nothing but likes on this vid. You know, I still can't see the dislikes, but that's needed here nor there Flair is one of the greatest to ever do any type of flopping in a WWE ring any ring actually doesn't even have to be WWE but Comment down below Let me know who are some of your favorite Wrestlers that are great at flopping or you know selling or maybe sometimes overselling I definitely would put Dolph Ziggler up there Dolph Ziggler with the hair that be all over the place when you flopping all over the place Fantastic as selling overselling and the rock of course back in his prime Man, he used to sell the stunner like nobody else. He'd be flopping all over the ring man He used to love that and HPK HPK is very good at selling and flopping sometimes as well But appreciate all the love and support road to 78 appreciate y'all kicking me. See y'all next piece