Categories
Preparedness

Day 1377 and The Responsibility of Preparing

I’ve written extensively about preparedness over the lifetime of this blog as we’ve experienced everything from a -40 polar vortex to a wildfire which burned down 3,000 homes in Boulder.

What people seem to forget is that life goes on during a disaster. My first taste of this was during Hurricane Sandy. My husband and I both worked through ten days of Manhattan being without power. And so we both prioritize preparing to manage through the disasters that man and nature throw our way.

We help our friends with preparedness. We have a sheet of our recommendations on what to purchase and for what scenarios. I suppose we could monetize some of that but we have generally treated this as an area where it’s our civic responsibility to be well prepared in a disaster so we don’t strain resources and can help others. We’ve both certified in wilderness medical incident response.

We are lucky to have the resources to be prepared but it’s easier than it looks. As the devastation of Helene has shown us everyone can find themselves at risk and it’s as a community that we can survive. I am praying for those in the path of Milton.

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Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 1362 and Hilux Drip

The right to repair movement is a worthy effort fighting the banal evil of planned obsolescence.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s an economic and industrial design strategy to deliberately make products with shorter functional lives to “shorten the replacement cycle” aka make you buy a new one.

If you are a user of Apple products (as I am) then you are probably familiar with its reputation for degrading service. They are paying out to the tune of 500m for the practice.

But right to repair issues and planned obsolescence doesn’t just happen in electronics. It’s a problem in auto repair and home appliances too. Repairing a broken part can be more expensive than buying a new item.

And it’s getting worse. Computer chips are now in everything from your refrigerators and dishwasher to your car. Consumers reasonably loathe the increased complexity and challenges of repairing major purchases when everything is “smart.”

At this point I’m willing to pay more money for appliances with zero smart features and physical controls for everything. @ Kelsey Hightower

And I fear most of our regulatory climate is dedicated to making this problem worse. When Japanese automakers first come to the United States their vehicles had longer lifespans so American carmakers were forced to respond by building more durable products. That was a positive thing.

But geopolitical tensions being what they are the, U.S. Commerce Department proposed a national security ban on certain Chinese and Russian-made car parts from U.S. roads The motive is to protect American consumers from digital surveillance and hijacking. But who knows what gets caught up in the effort as we could be allowing in parts that make it easier to repair our own cars.

If we learned anything from Japanese cars it’s that allowing competition was an unalloyed good. There are cars I wish we had in America like the iconic Toyota Hilux. Here is a synopsis from Perplexity on why the Toyota Hilux is considered to be so durable. It’s got a robust chassis, a simple design that is easy to repair, minimal electronics and high quality components.

But you can’t own a Hilux in America. Why? The “Chicken Tax,” a tariff on light trucks, was imposed by the United States in retaliation for tariffs placed by other countries on American chickens.

But maybe it’s good we Americans can’t have a light truck that is easy to repair and designed to last. The internet has a long lore of memes dedicated to the car’s use in revolutions. You certainly wouldn’t want Americans getting any ideas about that.

A viral parody meme about why the Hilux is the choice for insurgents

Categories
Culture Preparedness

1355 and Critical Desalination Point

Being under the weather over the weekend, I’m watching comfort content. I like science fiction and big splashy science disaster porn.

I finally watched the 2019 Chinese “Wandering Earth” based on a short story by Liu Cixin

It was nice to see a big budget Chinese film with some modest Warrior Wolf diplomacy but it was mostly interesting because of the immense engineering projects and the scope of the thing.

I loved Roland Emmerich movies as a young woman. Splashy big budget movies that turned on goofy science jargon like “we’ve hit a critical desalination point!

Dennis Quaid is an Everyman scientist

Remember a time when NOAA scientists could be heroes? Yeah it didn’t work that great. Trust the science. Alas we don’t have the same respect for government scientists in the era before Covid. I wonder what it would take to save the world.

Categories
Preparedness Reading

Day 1307 and Smoke Dusk

I’ve been having some unwelcome negative emotions over the past few weeks of political turmoil. It could be a function of long Covid or some variant of season affective disorder. I got introduced to an even worse environmental trigger.

Wildfires burning both in state and across the west gave us low cloud cover. You could barely see the next road let alone the mountains. The whole day felt like dusk. A long dim suffocating presence that felt like it would resist nightfall. It was smoky perma-dusk day where neither horizon nor blue sky could be seen.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

William Gibson Neuromancer

Probably his most famous piece of prose, this introduction manages to evoke something beyond the literal color and into an expansive image of otherworldly nothing.

He apparentlyimagined an ancient TV … that grey/ haze as the tube warmed to a channel that was ‘active’, but sending no programming” which was “the black and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful

The pain of a sky blocked out by smoke from wildfires even at high noon is unsettling and uncanny. It’s hard to feel right when what you see is so destructive.

We are safe inside the house with air purifiers in every room. The Conway HEPA filter went from one crisis to the next as a pandemic purchase that works on pollution too. The custom software that Alex uses to manage our smart home is showing perfect interior quality as the purifiers run day and night. Outside the AQI score was 118 “unhealthy for sensitive individuals.”

We’ve got a few more hours to sunset but a thunderstorm might be moving in.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1276 and Not Just A River in Egypt

I’m pretty comfortable with being embarrassed. I get stuff wrong and I have to come to terms with it even as my ego complains bitterly. The ego protects itself with denial but that doesn’t mean its conclusions are correct.

Being impartial about your reality is hard. Denial is such a normal part of catastrophic events the CDC even has handy public health explainers. I hope post pandemic everyone can enjoy the irony of that.

Taking an impartial view when approaching a problem is hard. If it’s an especially destructive situation (as most forms of crisis tend to be) wanting to put off action is a common coping mechanism. We do it as individuals and we do it within the meta-organisms that form the cultural and political systems we live within.

My suspicion is that some of our current political problems are a result of denialism. Seeing things as they are is impossible for some people. Avoidance, rationalization and minimization is practically a skill set.

I’d hope in a crisis I would attempt to solve a problem with whatever meager tools and skills I had at my disposal. I’ve done my best to take action on a few slow moving problems. And yet impartiality only arises when I can accept reality. And I wouldn’t blame anyone who finding the reality completely unacceptable.

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Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1261 and the Jackpot

Dedicated roamers of the internet are people who like to notice things. Cyperpunk aesthetics made it romantic to experience global abstractions even as the reality of the power of oligarch, state and corporation blended into murky dystopian reality.

I said recently on this photo that we’ve got to stop hyperstitioning William Gibson. We keep finding ourselves further into the future. Just look at these anonymous accounts (so you can enjoy being a participant in the propaganda) joking about a drone operator in Ukraine.

We have netrunners. They’re autistic Ukrainian drone operators and their ice baths are niccy rushes

It’s hard to remember that real people exist on the other side of the abstractions. And yet here we are about to be those real people facing history. And it does seem like the time for taking action is now.

Venkatash Rao wrote an essay “many shoes are dropping” that gave me the kind of frisson of living in future, but as Gibson famously says, a bit unevenly. Across all narrative and technical arcs and and inside geopolitical realities we are starting to see the change.

In this I can’t help but see Gibson’s Jackpot. The elements that Rao calls out are multiple significant elections (not the least of which is the final installment of Biden vs Trump), the capital and nation state power consensus he calls “after Westphalia” and the intertwined fates of artificial intelligence and crypto.

A lot can change in a world where every form of power is being tested. I’ve written about this Jackpot energy before.

The fictional “jackpot” described in the novels is an “androgenic, systemic, multiplex” cluster of environmental, medical and economic crises that begins to emerge in the present day and eventually reduces world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century

The Jackpot Trilogy.

I myself think it a privilege to even be a bit player in this moment in time. That I can allocate resources in any way feels high leverage in a way I didn’t anticipate experiencing.

We are the adults in the room. It may not be mich but we have agency. I feel good about putting my focus on crypto, AI and nuclear energy. Like Rao I can tie together past thoughts across a wide corpus by writing here every day and make decisions based on what has emerged.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1247 and For The Uncertain

If you have concerns about the instabilities abroad and at home in America, I am here to be of service. Being a Cassandra is a curse but when the moment arrives you are at least well prepared.

And so if you’d like to chat about things like moving to Montana, being prepared for disasters natural or man-made, or otherwise how to invest in adaptability at venture scale I am your woman.

I’ve been discussing my concerns in prestige glossies and serious news media for years. I see venture friends throwing apocalypse themed parties and I can’t help but feel like the hour is late.

I call this kind of mass awakening to reality the Thursday Styles Problem. By the time something is cool it’s already past time for you the regular person to benefit much from the knowledge of what’s coming.

Categories
Preparedness Travel

Day 1209 and No Mercy On The Road

No matter now much I prepare, and I clearly take packing and travel preparedness seriously, there is no overcoming the random shitshows that plague travel these days

I swung through Chicago’s O’Hare in an economy seat to position myself for a long haul flight. That short haul economy flight went without a hitch. I landed in Terminal 1 and made my way t Terminal 5 which is how things started going sideways in multiple directions.

The bus system/holding pen for transit between terminals is amazing for its on the ground access to airplanes but it sure is slow. Once I got to Terminal 5 it was clear the lounge assigned me via the airline wouldn’t work. It was 5 degrees warmer than in the airport terminal (a European airline of course) with no available seating, or inexplicably, any bathrooms. So much for having paid a premium.

I wandered up and down Terminal 5 looking for a food court. Frontera’s takeaway sandwiches had a forty minute wait. Dunkin Donuts was fully stocked but with a 40 person deep line. There was somehow no McDonalds.

The upscale fast casual options like Wow Bao and other private equity branded spots all took turns shouting what they were out of to the crowd waiting. No falafel or pita at the Mediterranean spot. Only 3 options were remaining at the Asian fusion spot. I got half my dumpling order. I didn’t have the heart to press for the remaining items from the single harried worker. $8 didn’t matter.

I went to my gate to wait for the flight afterwards. I sat on the floor. There were no seats anywhere in the terminal (or as previously mentioned the lounge). Somehow, once I boarded my long haul flight the crew managed to change my assigned seat on it without consulting me. It was a much worse seat than I had purchased.

If I had any idea how bad this new seat was going to be I might have fought it at counter, alas they gave no indication this new seat would be an issue.

It was the worst possible seat in the class without any place to store a backpack under foot nor were there holders or nooks for water bottles or your other sundries. I struggled to reposition medication and liquids on the tiny table. The chatty friendly Boomer next to me didn’t realize he was using both his table as well mine making it even order to find space to groom and medicate.

I tried to get that across to him. That all of the space he was using wasn’t actually space but meant to be my side. I failed to get that through. He stole my pack of tissues when I left it out. He did give them back when I pressed him. He seemed embarrassed. Later I released he’d also taken my water bottle. I feel there must be some wider lesson in this.

It wasn’t a proper flat lay seat though I’d paid for a business ticket. I had nowhere to put my medications, toiletries or other sundries. There wasn’t even a spot to put a water bottle. I rearranged as much as I could to avoid having all my things fall into the aisle, took an Ambien, prayed I’d not need access anything else and went to sleep.

I woke up on the other side of the ocean, gathered my things and deplaned.

My watch dinged. Your iPad has been left behind. Somewhere in this process my iPad must have been lost. I didn’t take it out of my backpack to my knowledge so that was a mystery. As I deplaned I was sure I had everything.

Behind where was the question? I only had 30 minutes to get rush to the last leg of my flight but I vainly went back to previous gate trying to see if that was where my iPad had been left behind. There was one at the gate which seemed fast.

As I unpacked all my bags trying to see if the tablet might be somewhere in my luggage I fell and broke my iPhone screen in the process. The top half shattered. It might hold it together for a day or two. Maybe.

Then I had issues clearing the next leg security with my injection medications for my ankylosis. I was told I didn’t need to clear security at this transit point so I wasn’t fully prepared. My bag got unpacked again. At least at this point it was clear my iPad really was gone.

Finally I make with 10 minutes to spare to my final leg. I am upgraded to first but they refuse to allow me to bring my carry on. “It is over 18 kilos!” I begin to cry. It was not over 18 kilos. I weighed it myself.

No one else was even in my 3 rows around me. The empty upper baggage storage had no other bags in them. I tried to sway them saying I have a medication I can’t afford to lose. Nothing works. She wants to exercise authority. My grey roller bag is put below. I pray it’s not also lost to me.

At this point I’ve not eaten a real meal in 24 hours, two crucial electronics are status “unsure” and I’ve got no way of knowing if either my roller bag or checked luggage will make it. Thankfully my three bag cascade system has me with a change of pajamas, basic toiletries and my medications. No matter the effort I point in there never seems to be mercy for the traveler

Categories
Preparedness Travel

Day 1207 and Joy of Preparing

Yesterday I wrote about how I’d come to enjoy the complicated game of speaking to others about yourself through appearance. I had been packing some travel bags and had a lot of different context switching to account for what I needed in my suitcase.

Preparedness is somewhere between a neurosis and a hobby for myself and a number of my friends. My husband and I are definitely who you email if you want get into preparedness.

We have fun. I have a group chat where our favorite topic is how we like to stage and prepare different types of bags for life and travel. Everything from which medications should be or the ideal toiletries is in the box.

It can nice to have fun with considering resilience. It’s normal to do wilderness first responder training or to have a go-bag in case of a fire evacuation in Montana. It’s a norm now rural or not to to be prepared.

Everywhere has a risk. Fires, hurricanes, flooding, tornados, earthquakes are new normal of everyone lives. The joy of preparedness is worth embracing. Think of it as kind of anti-Marie Kondo approach to thriving in a more chaotic world.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1171 and Choosing Life

“Since you’ve chosen death I must choose another path” It was a shitpost. I posted an acceleration meme. I happily endorse the bumpy progress of material change and the myriad human lives that choose to grow. The responses to my shitpost show that it’s no longer a joke.

Accelerate or die in style of the American Revolution “unite or die” snake representing the thirteen colonies but in the form of a network diagram.

I live in very clear reveled preferences on this front. My husband and I are accelerating the real world in our home in Montana. In two years we’ve planted a fruit orchard, installed solar grid, use the power from that grid to grow hydroponics and mine Bitcoin, we got chickens and advocate for local growth initiatives that allow people in Montana to live and grow together in mutual freedom.

I also believe those rights in the real world rest on a bedrock of natural rights enumerated in the American constitution.

And yet the constituency of safetyists somehow sees it appropriate to invoke force and the state’s monopoly on violence onto their fellow citizens.

You say “if necessary we will stop you”

And then suggest you want to engage in earnest debate. I find it hard to believe a good faith reader doesn’t immediately see the cognitive dissonance.

I do have the right to do as I choose as I am an American. We have first amendment rights.

Until you can measurably demonstrate proof that access to compute (which is just mathematics) has specific measurable harms you cannot invoke force on your fellow citizen for your personal paranoias.

The encryption wars had the same logic. So I ask people who worry about the consequences of compute power and artificial intelligence to give us what we’ve asked for in the form of measurably demonstrated specific types of harms where access to compute is a threat.

No “what if” hysterics, show me specifics and we can address those in policy. Armageddon in your head isn’t adequate. Being afraid isn’t enough.

If you can show measurable harms do so. We must hew to empiricism any time we seek to align others to our cause. Show me specific harms & we work to redress those harms. Actual crimes that exist already should be prosecuted as such. Seeking to newly criminalize a basic right because of unprecedented circumstances should be subject to the highest of scrutiny.

However if you show me you want the power for yourself to make these decisions I say no. We all keep our own conscience. We have existing rights.

I have shown through my revealed preferences I also believe this transition to more artificial will be chaotic. An age of higher variance is upon us and this can be a good thing with enough energy and intelligence. And we are about to get more intelligence thanks to the tools we have built.

I hope we can mitigate its harms. I believe we can apply ourselves in individual ways coordinated by the best efforts of those who build new tools. And that because we cannot predict with certainty we must hold firm to our principles doubly so then. We must be brave in approaching these problems as the principles matter.

Marxist Leninist thought has proven resilient

I am not advocating for revolution. I am advocating for keeping our heads and our hearts in times of change and protecting all of our freedoms.

We have historically shown the value of this position and the folly of violent control “for your own good.” Consider those classic socialist musicians the Beatles. Even they understood that revolutionary force was bad.

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all wanna change the world

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out, in

Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We all doing what we can

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is, brother, you have to wait

Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We’d all love to change your head (ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead (ah, shu-bi-do, ah)

If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow

Revolution 1 – The Beatles

If you want to go around quoting Chairman Mao you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow. How prescient those British Boy Band Boomers were. If you are so certain a revolution is necessary but you will take my compute from me then it’s you who wishes to be the Vanguard not me.

These calls for safety and caution, lest an apocalypse scenario ensue, appeal emotions to seek a tyranny of the majority for a fantasy of control over something that “may” be dangerous but not in any empirical ways we can address together and in specific ways. They don’t want to be accountable. Accountability is a democracy not this pantomime of concern seeking control.

Appealing to fears is control. All of the issues which have been brought up in artificial intelligence and access to computer models have past analogs and parallels in our existing policy tool set and within the enumerated rights.

Feel free to specify those issues into specifics and not act like this is Patriot Act 2^nth Terminator 2 Boogaloo. We have no need to indulge in Tom Clancy level panic about sum of all fears.

To lighten the mood this is an aligned AI for you.

Terminator gave his life to save John Conner T2.

If we are in for a Copernican revolution then do not be the church. We must bring our humanity to whatever happens next. Do not seek to control out of fear.

Embrace the freedoms of affirming your right to choose your own human life. These new tools can we’ve built from mathematics and computation can enrich all our lives.

Lest you not think I take the consequences of this massive change and its potential for dislocation seriously, I live off grid with redundant power and water in Montana. I invest exclusively in solutions to the real problems we face in uncertain times including energy, open source, decentralization & trustless intermediaries. I walk this walk. The choice to make the future is up to all of us. And we should walk it in the most life affirming way we can for each of us.