Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Fixing and making things, what tools to get and what skills to learn, ...
7Wannabe5
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Yeah, when Florida goes underwater and California dries up, we'll be back to poaching prunes to go with our breakfast eggs and ham in February in Michigan.


white belt
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by white belt »

For you food storage pros out there, how do you decide when to start to draw down your supplies vs when to continue to stockpile things?

For example, during the initial COVID lockdowns did you stay at home and draw down your months long supply? Or did you continue to replenish your stockpile with regular grocery trips as a hedge against supply chain disruptions?

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

I have refilled my freezer with meat every few days. When I got sick and had to quarantine I would make a beef stew every few days and never wanted for anything.

jacob
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by jacob »

No hard rule but more a decision weighing the "risk of going out" vs the "risk of running out of food". There are two boundary cases to this. One is that you have no food, like most people, and therefore have to go out. The other is that you have tons (1 year++) of food and therefore don't have to make the decision at all.

I'd say as a general rule, watch what other humans are doing. Specifically the first group because it is largest and determines what demand the supply will try to meet. I remember there being a thread with moral debates whether one should stock up further if one already had enough during the early COVID stage. You could read that for a "live" example.

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Alphaville
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Alphaville »

Ego wrote:
Mon Jan 16, 2017 10:43 pm
Huh? 1-2 MONTHS!? What specifically is on the horizon that would cause that kind of food disruption?
oh haha it’s so fun to read these necroed threads in hindsight...

and yeah, @jacob keeps winning the office pool :D

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Alphaville
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Alphaville »

anyway, was coming here to say “medic”.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I am just now starting to run out of the asthma medication I stockpiled for COVID. Obviously, getting medical care is no longer a problem, but given the small size of medications, it seems like regulations are biggest hurdle to stocking up on prescription drugs I might need for even longer emergency situation. Lacking skills necessary to make an albuterol filled inhaler from scratch, the best plan I can come up with is to have stash of ephedra based diet pills and coffee or black tea.

Also, even though I did have antibiotics stash, I did not have the skills necessary to know I should have started taking them to avoid sepsis when I contracted other infection during height of COVID transmission lockdown in my region. I recently read that risk/rate of death from sepsis is quite high even in normal situation and even medical professionals are frequently too slow to treat it effectively.

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Alphaville
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Alphaville »

oh damn. you’re near canada in case of emergency i guess...

back in the day (college) i used to work in a hippy store that sold ephedra/ma huang in the bulk section. trying to catch up with the times i just read that ephedrine is removed from pills now due to fda ban.

question is—could you grow ephedra for personal use? is it legal? would you know how to dose it?

eta: apparently still sold https://www.herbalshop.com/medicinal-he ... huang-gen/

wait maybe it was astragalus root. maybe both? anyway, my witch doctor skills need refreshing i guess. it’s been ages.

in case of emergency, witch doctoring might be all we have.

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Ego
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Ego »

Alphaville wrote:
Sat Oct 24, 2020 10:05 am
oh haha it’s so fun to read these necroed threads in hindsight...
Funny. I stand 100% behind everything I said in this tread.
Ego wrote:
Tue Jan 17, 2017 6:57 pm
My point is, these things don't happen without a lead-up. If you find yourself with an empty stomach, an empty pantry and empty store shelves on that day, then you haven't been paying attention.
Ego wrote:
Tue Jan 17, 2017 10:58 pm
In the past I would probably have shut up and shrugged. I may have even played along for the fun of a mental exercise. But I've come to realize that it is harmful to indulge the fear in those who are prone to it. Harmful for them and harmful for all of us. It is like a contagious disease. The contagion of fear builds when we indulge it.

And that fear itself causes real, actual problems.

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Alphaville
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Alphaville »

Ego wrote:
Sat Oct 24, 2020 5:15 pm
Funny. I stand 100% behind everything I said in this tread.
it’s funny how it took life 3 years to answer that question eh?

i’ve been reading about unknown unknowns lately (taleb), and this was a priceless example. some things we just can’t know, hard as we might try.

it’s good to be aware of the fact that we’re always going to be caught by surprise, no matter how prepared. we need to be prepared to be surprised—tall order. i’m trying to learn this.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Alphaville:

Yeah, I should investigate other sources. Medications with ephedrine are still available, but you have to sign for them.

I don’t think COVID-19 qualifies as Unknown Unknown. The risk of super-bug was well established prior to its emergence. Like risk of 3 major crops failing, it was just an unknown known for most people. OTOH, experts in the field did not see subprime mortgage crisis coming, because they believed their own math.

Another example might be nobody in 1940 being able to predict that their adult great-grand-children would mostly be wearing fairly unisex pajama clothes in 2020.

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Alphaville
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Alphaville »

@7w5

yeah unknowns unknowns are always subjective. taleb makes a point that the 9/11 plot was not unknown to the hijackers.

personally i never thought a pandemic like this would hit the modern world, so this one went totally whooosh by me. not because superbugs (known to me) but because had i assumed matching superpowers $ competence from cdc/usa regsrdless of politics (oooopsie).

the thing caught me living in full minimalist mode, which is to say: thoroughly unready.

also interesting that @ego’s question was answered in 2 ways not just 1: food supply disruption + difficulty going out. so, either way. actually 3 ways if one counts loss of income for many—even though that’s known, it’s still often unexpected, keeps catching people by surprise.

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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by jacob »

Methinks "we" need to be very careful about the "Nobody knew ... " or "Not even the experts ..."-excuse. If nothing else, it's rather irksome to those who did know. Indeed, there's always some who knew but failed to convince the rest before it happened. The answer to "How come I never heard about it ... " is usually "Because you didn't pay attention" (amateur) or "Because your continued salary or self-understanding depended on you paying attention to the wrong thing" (professional) rather than an actual black swan. This goes for the pandemic as well as the great credit crisis and Trump winning the primary/election in 2016.

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Sclass
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Sclass »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sat Oct 24, 2020 11:59 am
Lacking skills necessary to make an albuterol filled inhaler from scratch,.
This isn’t rocket science. Before the pandemic I dug this out of my late mom’s junk pile. It is a consumable and you find these at thrift stores. The tubes of albuterol are prescription drugs but I think @Ego found some at a swap meet.

Image

This device is just a Bernoulli Venturi powered by a low pressure air source. It’s like tubes with holes and it can be Macguyvered up out of trash. I suspect a foot pump or bike pump could make it dose.

Probably not what you were asking for but just saying @7w you do have the skills.

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Alphaville
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Alphaville »

jacob wrote:
Sun Oct 25, 2020 8:51 am
Indeed, there's always some who knew but failed to convince the rest before it happened.
often ufairly labeled as paranoid, chicken little, conspiracy nut, etc.

but the problem is that there are actual paranoids and chicken littles and conspiracy nuts, and it can be difficult to tell the difference between one of those and an accurate predictor. there’s also the possibility that a random guess may be correct, a la “a broken clock is right twice a day” and causality inferences are made a posteriori.

black swans as i’m understanding them (i’m more than a decade late to the party, i was elsewhere doing other things, so i’m barely catching up here) are not about so much about wrong or right predictions, but the result of “platonizing” or clinging too closely to a theory—any theory—and being blindsided by reality.

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jennypenny
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by jennypenny »

white belt wrote:
Fri Oct 23, 2020 2:29 pm
For you food storage pros out there, how do you decide when to start to draw down your supplies vs when to continue to stockpile things?
There was some discussion in the Anyone prepping for Corona? thread.


I think the important thing wrt unknown unknowns (whether covid counts or not) is that regardless of the circumstance, you know that you need to eat, drink, have shelter, etc. Those are your personal 'knowns', if you will. If you have health issues that require accommodations, that's another known. If you'll have to care for other family members, that's another known. etc etc

I don't need to know exactly what might happen ... I only need to know my personal needs and what will be required of me (regardless of what happens), and then what I'll need (pre-staged/pre-planned) to deal with both.

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jennypenny
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by jennypenny »

Alphaville wrote:
Sun Oct 25, 2020 9:24 am
often ufairly labeled as paranoid, chicken little, conspiracy nut, etc.
No one would label Laurie Garrett or Michael Osterholm that way, and reading only one book written by either of them would have clued someone in to the potential for a pandemic.

It's dangerous to rationalize ignorance. Are there quacks? Sure, but the bona fides of Garrett and Osterholm speak for themselves. The same is true in many other fields.

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Alphaville
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Alphaville »

jennypenny wrote:
Sun Oct 25, 2020 9:39 am

I think the important thing wrt unknown unknowns (whether covid counts or not) is that regardless of the circumstance, you know that you need to eat, drink, have shelter, etc. Those are your personal 'knowns', if you will. If you have health issues that require accommodations, that's another known. If you'll have to care for other family members, that's another known. etc etc
YES. this is a great approach.
jennypenny wrote:
Sun Oct 25, 2020 9:45 am
No one would label Laurie Garrett or Michael Osterholm that way, and reading only one book written by either of them would have clued someone in to the potential for a pandemic.

and yet these people are often ignored

It's dangerous to rationalize ignorance. Are there quacks? Sure, but the bona fides of Garrett and Osterholm speak for themselves. The same is true in many other fields.
yes, but one’s theory of the world can be formed by a mistaken assumption for example that these capable people are at the center of things. i.e., “i don’t have to worry personally about a pandemic because the experts will take care of it like they did with ebola”.

at the time garret published this: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/co ... -response/ i was nowhere near that publication. in spite of my deep ideological differences with the current administration, i trusted that the government would protect us.

instead of reading pandemic news i was deeply embedded in things like moving close to work, getting rid of my car, reducing carbon footprint, eliminating clutter, getting a bicycle for transportation, researching bicycles, etc, which would be great stuff to do for “normal” times.

i trusted normality so that i could focus on a personal/family/ economic transition. the transition worked out, so no complaints there, it just didn’t go exactly as planned. i was planning to live with no furniture and had to buy some instead (this was not a tragedy). covid so far has not been a black swan for me or my family—we’re doing okay (so far, knock on wood). we have had death in our extended family though, so we know it’s real.

even the well informed (not claiming i am one) can’t know everything, or may be paying attention to something else completely, or may be misled by gaps in the information they’re receiving (bad sources) or may be blindsided by the limits of their own theory.

the black swan problem arises not from “not knowing” per se, but from thinking one already knows all there is to know, or even that everything is knowable—from a failure of skepticism really.
Last edited by Alphaville on Sun Oct 25, 2020 10:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Alphaville
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Re: Useful Hard Skills for the near future

Post by Alphaville »

oops double post

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