Useful Hard Skills for the near future

[Alphaville]

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

[Alphaville]

anyway, was coming here to say “medic”.

[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.

[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.

[Ego]

oh haha it’s so fun to read these necroed threads in hindsight...

Funny. I stand 100% behind everything I said in this tread.

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.

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.

[Alphaville]

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]

@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.

[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.

[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.

[Sclass]

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.



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.

[Alphaville]

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.

[jennypenny]

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.

[jennypenny]

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.

[Alphaville]

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.

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.

[Alphaville]

oops double post

[7Wannabe5]

@Sclass:

Yeah, worst case scenario, I could just breath steamEd concoction. Albuterol wasn’t patented until 1972, and wasn’t widely available immediately, so I know quite a few hacks from my childhood. Theophylline is twin of Caffeine, so I became accustomed to being propped up with pillows, drinking black tea with sugar whenever I had a moderate attack. Anything “speed” like will probably have some level of bronchodilator effect.

When I read “The Knowledge”, I realized that chemistry is likely the skill set most lacking on average. The last class I took was AP Chem in high school. Since an inhaler is one of my critical smallest pouch EDC items, I suppose it would be worth my while to see how far I could go in hacking one, especially since the associated skills might also prove otherwise useful.

@jacob:

I get how the very well-informed generalist, as in “The Intelligent Investor” can sometimes do better than professional, but where is the brain that could have seen trends in feminism, plastics, and integration of Eastern practices in 1940 towards predicting popularity of yoga pants as female fashion in 2020? I might be abusing the term since I’ve only read “Anti-fragility”, but it seems to me that the human inability to judge relative speed/acceleration of collection of trends has something to do with Black Swans. Losing sight of boundary conditions would also apply.

[Sclass]

@7w I'm getting sidetracked here but I wonder if one of these would work? Fill it with an albuterol capsule and some carrier like distilled water and work out the concentration based on the required dose.



There are some really cheap versions of these at Amazon for $5. A hard skill is being able to calculate the dosing given a number of pumps and a diluted solution in the bottle...with a pencil and paper.

[7Wannabe5]

That might work. I think it’s diluted with ethanol. The math is not a problem. I am currently emergency certified to teach high school level calculus Anyways, albuterol can be safely inhaled at large multiple of recommended dose.

[Alphaville]

this might be bullshit because it’s just the interwebs but i’m curious about lobelia now

https://naturalsociety.com/herbs-khella ... ronchitis/

[7Wannabe5]

@Alphaville:

Easy enough to grow, but the side-effects for overdosing seem risky. The stimulant/bronchodilator is supposed to be like nicotine, so I’d probably be better off grabbing some chewing tobacco the zombies left behind after ransacking the mini-mart.

After reading this

https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethn ... ants.shtml

I am wondering whether caffeine in ethanol mist might work?