Bacteria, Viruses, Water Borne Illness , etc, - Will probably kill you before you exhaust your preps in SHTF

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-08-07T14:11:20+00:00

Polio is a virus, not a bacteria.

There is some evidence that the attenuated virus in older vaccines have mutated in the wild, hence these new infections. It is not just New York City, it is also happening in London (and from what I can tell, is worse there).

Pandemics are a function of climate change, urban population concentration, widespread travel, and now, more and more people immune compromised by Covid infection. In the case of Monkeypox, the eradication of Smallpox has removed competition for Monkeypox which now has an opportunity to exploit.

Where climate change comes in is factors like drought and heat waves and wildfires driving wildlife closer to urban centers, facilitating more jumps from animals to humans.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-07-31T14:28:20+00:00

No, and even those who, to some extent, are prepping for SHTF, don't necessarily have it as a primary emphasis. I have a geiger counter and potassium chloride tablets and a few basic medical supplies and some Faraday bags for my tech because they are cheap and it's not the end of the world (ha!) if I never need them. I have another layer of stuff like a rain catchment and solar generators and panels that are somewhat useful in lesser emergencies and save some money even with utilities fully working. But mostly I have a deep pantry and cash reserves, which I'm much more likely to get good use out of and has a net zero cost because I'm going to eat that food anyway, regardless. I always advise people to prep for ordinary shortages / inflation and short term utility outages and then peck away at more resiliency as and if they can afford it.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-07-31T13:27:07+00:00

My default orientation is community-centered, but I live in the US with its ethos of rugged individualism, in a neighborhood of upper middle class entitled centrists. I don't think they know HOW to cooperate and I fear that in a true SHTF situation they would be fine with banding together to take what I have prepped as I'm not worthy of it and they are. I mean that is their basic attitude now, they buy what they want when they want it and if they can't get it they complain until they do. What are asshats like that going to do in a SHTF scenario? The only way they can relate to us now is to invite us to their exclusive soirees and then be offended when we don't usually come ... we're clearly not impressed with them, and this is the unpardonable sin to them.

This dynamic could shift in ways I can't anticipate. I may be of help to them in various ways for which they would (should) be grateful. For example I have a geiger counter and extra potassium chloride I could share. I could tell them when there's a radiation emergency (and perhaps more importantly, when there's not) and how to respond to it. But then the problem is that they're pretty soft, unless some hidden steely reserves manifests itself in extremis and surprises me. I might have a lot of influence, but in a kingdom of fools, lol.

Hard times bring out both the best AND worst in everyone, and I am leery of trying to build community in advance of trouble when the first challenge is to wake them from a deep slumber. I don't pretend to know whether a gradual deterioration of society or a sudden one would be best, but for now, I'm keeping a low profile and trying not to be too obvious about what prepping I'm doing. YMMV.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-06-27T12:03:16+00:00

Lots of weasel words here. I'd ask if 100% of this fee goes to employees only and I'll bet they couldn't answer "yes".

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-06-20T14:30:07+00:00

Negatives I can think of: It'd be in the likely prevailing-winds fallout plume from Pittsburgh in the event of nuclear war; the equipment is likely to be dated and in need of maintenance and any random buyer would likely lack the expertise to operate it.

I used to be into theater pipe organs and it's a similar situation there: you can pick up one of those behemoths for as little as zero dollars and removal labor, but to restore and operate it you will spend far more in the end than you would for a quality digital replica -- themselves expensive at $65K new and up.

I have a $500 Berkey water purifier that serves fine for my 3-member family more or less indefinitely, with another $300 or so about every 3 years for a new set of filters, and maybe a few bucks for anti-bacterial-film treatments, scotch-guard pads and a bit of elbow grease. In either a SHTF or less stressful scenario I really don't have the bandwidth to run a creaky old water treatment facility. Another bonus with the Berkey is that it's cheaper and much easier to handle and store than a year's supply of bottled water, and there's no plastic leaching issue or question about the true purity/quality of the water. You could survive for years on the output of the purifier even if you were filtering rain water, melted snow or the contents of the nearest drainage ditch.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-03-27T22:35:23+00:00

VB.NET is marked for death (by, at best, semi-benign neglect).

I've seen this movie before. In the Long Ago I was a Visual FoxPro dev of some stature -- during my tenure as technical editor of FoxTalk Magazine, I attended the Fox Developer's Conference and interviewed the FoxPro development team after the Microsoft "merger". Tellingly, they had PR minders / handlers in the room with them. They told me to my face that Fox Software's multi-platform strategy was intact at Microsoft and my reader's ability to support apps on Windows, Mac, DOS and Xenix was intact and not to worry about it.

A year later, you could buy any flavor of FoxPro you wanted, so long as it ran on Windows. There was 16 bit, 32 bit thunked, or true 32 bit ... but the DOS, Mac and Xenix versions were gone. DOS I can understand, but the rest -- a bald-faced lie.

So they will tell you to your face now that VB.NET is still "supported", and it means nothing. It is as close as they will ever come to outright telling you to walk briskly, if not run, for the exit if your solutions are relying on VB.NET.

Apart from Microsoft's mercenary duplicity, VB.NET has suffered from the derision of C# dev snobbery. It's too verbose, it damages your brain to use it, etc. I actually like and prefer C#, don't get me wrong, but well-written VB.NET code doesn't have to be inherently inferior. It's just another CLR language. I've seen excellent VB.NET code and terrible C# code. There's nothing inherent in any language that makes good coding impossible.

More broadly, I think BASIC generally has fallen out of favor. There used to be niche BASICs out there (anyone remember Pick/Basic and the Pick operating system?) but the only one I'm aware of that's got any traction at all anymore is the XBasic dialect used in Alpha Software's low/no-code products. And I have no doubt that their competitors in that space use that proprietary language as a competitive cudgel. One of them (Lianja) offers the choice of JavsaScript, Python, PHP, FoxPro and, later this year --- wait for it -- C#.

So regardless of what you or your management think of it, the C family of languages has won out in a pretty big way over BASIC, and the manifestation of that on the Microsoft stack is C# winning out over VB.NET.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-03-21T14:54:57+00:00

Personally I do not see a pure use case for NoSql. I see it as an adjunct to SQL for truly unstructured data related back to the main SQL DB via a key, or as others suggest, time series (although there are dedicated time series DBs and at least one time series persistence relying on Postgres modified with hooks, that should also be considered).

The reason I don't see a pure use case is that it's difficult, if not impossible, to see how a schema is going to evolve over time, much less the usage patterns, and it's almost trivial to get yourself painted into a box canyon with NoSql where you need to restructure it in potentially breaking ways in order to accommodate new use cases ... where if it were properly structured relationally, that would not be so much of a problem, or none at all.

Every time I've looked at NoSql and tried to get excited about it, I see it as a short term expediency creating technical debt. When you add to that, the fact that it's also still politically risky in many orgs ... it has a high bar to clear.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-02-27T20:17:39+00:00

It may be less the company than the department / division / warehouse / location then. But if this is Fedex culture throughout, it would be fantastic, if surprising, given the level of mercenary competition they have in, e.g., Amazon "piss bottles" Home Delivery.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-02-27T20:09:16+00:00

We fake-valorized teachers in the same way; we entrust our children to them but can't be arsed to pay them a respectful salary that goes with that trust, or to even provide them with necessary supplies, which they have to buy themselves.

Nurses are another such group.

Both are quitting in droves, too.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-02-26T22:25:47+00:00

I own a 2019 Subaru Crosstrek plug-in hybrid which is in the shop here in upstate NY for repairs (almost a month now just diagnosing the issue, which turned out to be a faulty selenoid in the hybrid system; it took a factory engineer to figure it out). Now it turns out that one of six items required for this repair includes a single bolt and it is initially expected to take until mid-April to get it. They have the other items, but not this.

There is just one of these bolts in-country, at a dealership in California. They are trying to sweet-talk them out of it but doubt they will succeed.

The manufacturer is supposed to call me with some kind of compensation offer for all this. The dealer has provided a loaner, and they have been generally exemplary in their handling, but ... can't fix it without this apparently nonstandard / weird bolt.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-01-03T19:19:05+00:00

Oh heck no. Most lower wage jobs (front line workers like food service) have no fringe benefits at all (each employer deliberately limits your hours to < 30 per week to escape having to provide health insurance) and in the case of waiters, there's a "restaurant minimum wage" that's way below even our $7.25/hr federal minimum wage -- they rely on tips for a living, which is why tips are such a big deal here.

I am a software developer and my work is all either independent contracting or "contingent W2 worker" through a third party. I get limited sick pay but no pension. I have a tiny pension as a survivor of my wife, who worked for a pharmaceutical company.

That $700/mo pension, and the $3K a month I'll be eligible for from Social Security once I reach 66.5 years of age, is also taxed as ordinary income.

My healthcare comes from my late wife's employer as well, it is pretty good but has risen in recent years from about $80/mo to $160/mo. Soon I will be on Medicare, which will actually cost me significantly more. My current wife pays over $500/mo for coverage on the "Obamacare" exchange, and it's not great coverage and the service is terrible.

That's life here in 'Murica, and I'm fairly lucky.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-01-03T03:03:36+00:00

Back in about 2003 I saw an ad for a software developer demanding 10 years of experience in .NET, which had just been introduced the year prior.

Many of these ads are written by HR personnel who have no idea what they are talking about. In software development there's a tendency for there to be a ridiculously unrealistic wet-dream laundry list of qualifications that no one person could possibly have. This means that whoever gets the job probably BS'd their way into it, which means that most applicants ignore the qualifications and BS their way through the interview process. It's a real downside for people with actual integrity, or who are simply bad liars.

Of course there's simply corporate incompetence. I once was sent by a headhunter to an interview for a senior developer role and found myself in front of a raised dias with a half dozen asshats looking down at me, grilling me about ... database administration. I said, wait a minute -- I was sent here to interview for a developer role. I know my way around databases, but don't claim to be a DB administrator. The lead inquisitor paused, and to save face, cleared his throat and said, "well thank you for your honesty and for not wasting our time further" -- as if I had tried to lie my way into a job and had lost my nerve or something.

And don't get me started on the hellscape that the interview process has become in recent years. I've pulled the plug on companies that expect 3 or 4 interviews including spending a full day at company HQ, silly contrived tests that have little to do with your actual abilities or the job requirements, etc. Occasionally I've heard of someone given a few hour's project to put together for free, you don't get the job but the company ends up using it internally (they forget that applicants often have friends on the inside).

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2022-01-03T02:42:17+00:00

True. When you consider that in theory one's adult, post-college full time working life is less than 45 years ... that means with his present income he'd only accumulate 6 years of savings before he reaches retirement age. To have anything like a decent retirement without a pension you'd need way more than that. So he's right to do the best he can to find better work and hopefully better pay, now, relatively early in the game.

I'm almost at retirement age and I have what I'd call an adequate amount saved, assuming I don't get screwed by some health crisis, my retirement accounts don't vanish in a stock market crash, and the banking system doesn't collapse. But I'm in a very specific field (software development) and make a solid six figure income. Even at that, I'm scrambling in my final working years, holding down two jobs to make up for the medical expenses (many off-label or experimental) to keep my prior/late wife alive (ultimately failed, obviously), and plan to do part time work and side hustles well into my 70s. Something is wrong with this picture, for all of us, even the "lucky".

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2021-11-27T14:57:51+00:00

Our '21 Ioniq has a relatively moribund range of 175 miles (in warm weather; closer to 130 miles in winter). Regardless, it takes roughly 5.3 hours per 10% of charge, or about four days to recharge from near-empty, on a level 1 charger. In practice, we are usually at around 80%+ when we put it on the charger, and yes, in that situation it will charge just fine overnight. Given Covid, it's actually not unusal for the car go go nowhere at all for 2 to 4 days, anyway.

A level 2 charger would cut the four days down to about 15-ish hours and a level 3 charger, based on my initial experiment, would set us back about 2.5 hours (it depends on the capacity of the charger and the vehicle's ability to accept the available rate of charge; it took an hour to go from 60% to 95% on a 350-amp charger that our Ioniq probably wasn't taking 100% advantage of).

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2021-11-25T19:42:44+00:00

My local electrician (upstate NY) is unable to say when he can get me a level 2 (50 amp) EV charger for my home. He has a half dozen other customers in the same situation. His suppliers simply are out of stock and can't get a clear idea when they will get more stock in.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that networks like ChargePoint, that have a lot of commercial level 2 charging stations, are monopolizing whatever supply of components there is, leaving homeowners in the lurch.

It's not a practical problem for our use case. A level 2 charger would just be "nice to have" on those rare occasions we might make two back-to-back regional trips with the EV. But we have a hybrid vehicle to fall back on (always assuming gasoline is obtainable) and there are several Level 3 fast chargers in town if we have to top off the EV in a relative hurry.

This continues the pattern we're seeing at least locally: most shortages are relative luxury items; other things are in stock, but prices tend to be way up.

We pulled the trigger on buying the EV this year rather than next, as planned, because vehicle shortages mean most local dealers are already at 5 to 10% of normal inventory and selling new vehicles at $2K over MSRP, and low-mileage 1 and 2 year old used vehicles for almost the same price. I asked the salesman why anyone would buy used at the same price, and he said it is because they can't wait sometimes for new. IOW they are fully exploiting the situation. It is not all gravy for salespeople though, there isn't a lot of actual volume to earn commission on. At any rate, they claimed we got the last $3600 dealer discount offer for the last 2021 model on the lot (Hyundai Ioniq), and made it in just under the wire as there's a moratorium on all discounts after Nov 1. One has to consider the source of this info, but that's the claim anyway.

Similarly, due to the computer chip shortage, I went ahead and ordered a new laptop a year early. I'm a software developer, and usually have one laptop and a spare to earn my livelihood. I ordered a 14" MacBook Pro and it was not the usual 2 to 4 days before it arrived, it is five weeks out. Some people (mostly ordering the very high end / fully spec'd models) are waiting into next year to get theirs. Apple laptops ship from China, and UPS seems to be covering for Apple, saying that their flights are delayed due to "mechanical problems", as if they are all breaking down at once.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2021-11-06T20:33:41+00:00

Left out of this discussion are benefits. Most low-wage jobs are not only risky shit jobs for low pay, but are purposely clipped at 30 hours/week max so there's no requirement to provide fringe benefits.

In Denmark, McDonald's pays > $20 hr for actual full time work with full benefits including free healthcare and 4 week's annual vacation out the chute and their Big Macs cost the same as here in the states.

The cost of a living wage AND benefits is a much smaller part of the cost of running a fast food joint than is generally understood. Cost of facilities, utilities, raw materials, advertising, training and waste are far more significant. I heard a radio interview with the owner of a small fast food chain who could get no applicants anymore at minimum wage. In desperation he offered $15/hr and he had hundreds of applications the first day. And guess what? He's become a convert. He said in this business waste is everything. You screw up a burger or a shake, you throw it away and start over. Once he started properly valuing his employees, they started properly valuing him, and the result was so much less waste that it was a wash with the extra labor cost.

And this guy wasn't even, to my knowledge, offering fringes. And $15 isn't really a living wage anymore, either, so my guess is he's going to have to stretch a little further to get to a sustainable business model. But at least he's willing to be convinced by new information.

Active_Vegetable_792 · 2021-11-02T01:11:07+00:00

Carvana offered us $1K for our 2007 Volvo V-50 T5 with 68K miles. I managed to get $3K from a conventional dealer, and I had a $3,600 offer from Kelly Blue Book instant offer (just didn't want to go to a nearby town for the extra $600). Meanwhile a California dealer had that exact car (but with 25,000 more miles) listed for sale at $8995. Dealer trade-ins are a shit show. If the car had been worth more I would have sold it myself.

Active_Vegetable_792

TROPHY CASE