Tag: Prepper

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Preparedness

Day 1427 and Main Character Energy

I feel like I’m in some sort of slapstick comedy with our city pratfalls. I’m in Los Angeles for the holidays which has been somewhat pleasant except for the modest signs of barely contained emergent chaos.

Which I frankly don’t expect to see we are staying in a very bougie neighborhood called Marina Del Rey. I figured the wealth that holds it together would make it more navigable. Lol.

There is something extremely funny about leaving your cozy Montana home with its backup solar power and multiple heating systems only to find yourself in an large apartment building on a rickety grid in an enormous city over which you have no control.

Last night around 11pm there was massive power outage affecting much of Marina Del Rey. Alex was already asleep having had a busy day so when the power dropped I didn’t want to wake him.

I went to fill up containers with water just in case we needed to flush the toilets as we are on an upper floor. I took a few pictures and went to bed with earplugs in and an eye mask figuring it would resolve itself.

The view from our Airbnb and the next set of low rises without power.
What seemed to be edge of the outrage from the Airbnb two or three blocks out.

Alex woke up at 6am and the power was still out. He had been working so nothing was charged and we had no WiFi. It was dark out as he started his work day on east Coast hours

It turned out the outrages were larger than just the complex around us. Twitter had some estimates for who was without power but we weren’t the only family members without power or water in the neighborhood.

Mind you this is the beachfront south of Santa Monica so a pretty upscale area populated by Silicon Beach types. It is unincorporated community in Los Angeles county which complicates its infrastructure.

The outage stretched on into mid morning. The car we had rented was trapped in the garage with the power out. The elevators were obviously not working and we were quite a few floors up. We couldn’t shower or wash up. Thankfully I had water for the toilets to flush.

It all felt a little dramatic for what should be a pretty normal day. Imagine if there had been an actual storm or an earthquake. Complaining about it on Twitter was made humorous given our friends know we are the types to do preparedness planning. We are all at the mercy of a blown transformer. So make sure you keep extra water on hand.

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Emotional Work

Day 1380 and Another Turn Around The Sun

Life has been on a wonderful trajectory for me over the last four years. The pandemic marked breaks in everyone’s lives and the chances we were afforded to shape our lives was a privilege in a disruptive and challenging time.

Others took similar leaps of faith into new ways of living. So as I celebrate my birthday today I feel such gratitude. I couldn’t ask for a better turn around the sun.

We had a life changing exit and a series of investments go our way, I made my way into inception & pre-seed investing with our pre-seed fund chaotic.capital, and we moved to Montana. It’s all amazing especially as it’s had its struggles with my health.

I am being offered a season of life where I feel like I can really contribute my skills in professional ways that could be impactful. Everything I’ve built towards and all of my interests and hobbies are tying together in amazing and exciting directions. A happy birthday to me for sure.

If you are in New York City I’ll be flying in this weekend for a week in the city. I’d love to meet founders, other investors, and startup folks in general. Also if any weird Dimes Square reactionaries want to meet up I offer parlay.

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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.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1365 and Good News, Bad News

It seems to be an absolutely awful week on Planet Earth. War, natural disasters, and human venality are on full display. It’s hard to even read the news, political or otherwise.

In contrast, I am myself in a good news place. I have a few leftover health issues as I leave behind the bout of respiratory issues (Covid’s legacy) but am otherwise full steam ahead.

Because I am so busy I find myself offline and missing things. It’s all good news in my world. And then I come back online to check feeds and it’s just all bad news.

I feel the privilege of it but I am also proud to have this stability. We made choices so our lives could be this way. We value preparedness and the calm that comes from planning.

I wish more people could live this way. Focus shouldn’t be reserved for a select few who can make good big life choices. That can be luck of the draw.

I do believe however it’s possible for many more of us to narrow focus so we can let small good choices compound. It’s good to appreciate the value of limiting your attention to your own priorities.

There is an argument to be made that only once you have steadied your own life can you look outside. Given how crazy the outside world can be give yourself the chance to have good news in your life. There will always be bad news.

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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.

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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 apparently “imagined 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.

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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.

Categories
Startups Travel

Day 1244 and Twenty Four Hours To Go

Discussing travel mishaps has become something of a national pastime for Americans.

Memorial Day Weekend is the official kick off to summer and I had the good fortune of doing a transcontinental flight. And by and large it went smoothly and enjoyably. It was a record breaking day for travel.

I was on a route I’d never done before flying Munich to Houston. I was on my way to my favorite crypto convention Consensus.

Despite the record breaking number of travelers, I had a pleasant United flight. The westward flights can be tricky for sleep as it’s not an overnight.

The logistics of this worked out as I slept 6 hours before a 4am wake up for the positioning flight and then on my flat lay got nearly a very decent four plus hours.

Munich to Houston is 10 hours & I slept well

My RHR was pretty high from the stress of flying but I was quite impressed that I got restorative sleep and REM. Those flat lays on Polaris really are worth it.

Once I landed in Houston I had a short layover where I was lucky enough to enjoy a sit down meal in the Polaris Lounge. I only wish I’d had more time to enjoy it but clearing customs, going back through security and rechecking luggage takes time.

United Polaris Lounge menu in Houston

After all this incredibly pleasant travel there has to be something right? I had a half mile walk to the E gates for my Austin flight. Americans don’t queue well so I arrived at the beginning of boarding. The entire plane boarded only for us to realize we had a serious mechanical issue.

We then deplaned and walked from the end of E gates to the very end of the C gates (about 22 minutes as the New Yorker walks and a mile and a half) to get to the new plane.

The crew was in danger of timing out while catering needed to do a supply for a down line flight. Someone’s executive decision worked in our favor as we got into the air without getting ice for whoever had the airplane next.

What is a two hour drive turned into a five hour ordeal but I made it in one piece and passed out much later than I intended after a full twenty four hours in transit.

Finally asleep at my hotel in Austin after a 4 hour mechanical failure & airplane change for a 30 minute fly time

If you are in Austin and interested in discussing the intersection of crypto and artificial intelligence I’d love to hear from you. I might need a bit more sleep first though.

A 10,000 step day is pretty good when most of it is sitting on airplanes.
Categories
Travel

Day 1210 and Technical Difficulties

I’m on the road. Despite carrying a laptop, an iPad and an iPhone as a three cascade backup of devices, I am down to 1.5 functional computing devices after losing my iPad and falling and cracking my phone.

This isn’t ideal as it fucked with my commitments which all require being online and functional. I landed in the afternoon and rested. Clearly I shouldn’t have taken that time for myself but rather used it to acquire fixes to these issues. Given that I need to hit publish and get on with it.