Category: Big Thoughts

Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV, and The Golden Horde

“I don’t need a receipt for a doughnut, man.  I give you the money, you give me the doughnut, end of transaction.  We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this.  I just cannot imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought doughnut.” – Dr. Katz

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This is how I imagine dogs imagine the end of the world.

Bringing you up to speed:  our hero has been trying to get home after an EMP – bringing about what is known as The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) or The Stuff Hits The Fan (TSHTF).  The first day on the road went pretty well.  But, you know, that can’t keep up, can it?

Previous posts are:

The next day?

EMP + 1, Noon.  111 miles from home.

Sound, at sea level, travels at about 1125 feet per second.

The velocity of a bullet from an AR-15 is about 3,200 feet per second.  And from a hunting rifle, say, a .30-06?  It travels about 2,800 feet per second.

Those numbers explain why I heard a soft splat on the asphalt in front of my bike wheel, then the buzzing sound of the bullet tumbling end-over-end in a ricochet off the ground before I heard the report from the rifle that fired the bullet.

If I had enough sensitive timing equipment, I could have even given a pretty good estimate of how far away the shooter was.

The average reaction time for a human to a stimulus that they’ve been waiting for is about a 0.25 seconds.  But when you’re in a car?  Some studies say 1.5 seconds.  Others say 2.5 seconds.  All I can say is that as soon as I realized that someone was shooting at me I hit both the front and rear brakes as hard as I could.  I think I was going about 20 miles per hour.  I probably pulled too hard on the front brake – the wheel locked and I went tumbling over the top of the bike, at least partially sideways, onto my right shoulder.

I tucked and rolled as I hit the asphalt, my backpack whipping me up in the air as I rolled up on and over it.  Rolling was better than sliding, and far better than holding my arm out and having my shoulder dislocated.

I came to a stop, my bike somehow in front of me.  It must have flipped over me and slid on the road.

My front bike tire jerked and popped, and then I heard another shot.

Adrenaline filling my system, time seemed to slow down.  I could see two immediate options – first, slip into the ditch near the road and get the hell out of here.  Second?  Play dead.

The second shot into the bike made that decision easy – they weren’t shooting to warn.  They were shooting to kill.  Thankfully they were lousy shots.

And the day had been going so well.

The first day’s ride had been great and mostly uneventful.  This morning I’d woken up with the Sun, but was so very sore, especially my butt.  I folded up my tarp, Mylar blanket, and poured some water on the fire.  My Lifestraw worked, and I filled up water bottles from a (barely) flowing creek bed by taking successive mouthfuls in and spitting them into the bottle.  It wasn’t exactly hygienic, but it was also unlikely that I’d give myself Ebola, cooties, or zombie plague.  The water was cool, but tasted . . . a bit off.  I trusted that the Lifestraw’s guarantee was good, even though it was unlikely that I’d ever be able to collect it wasn’t.

For the second day, I was averaging over 20 miles per hour.  The wind was at my back.  I could see smoke rising from where I thought the big city was, and wondered how bad things were getting there.  Thankfully, I was a good 40 miles south of the big city.  But when I was getting ready to cross under the Interstate a half mile east, and then my friend, the lousy shot, changed my plans.

And I was here in this damn ditch.

Thankfully the two-lane road that I’d been on was lined with trees on either side.  I got up, ran into the hedgerow and then out of the trees and into a pasture that was blocked from view of the overpass.  I pulled a camouflage rain poncho out of my pack – it was probably better visual cover than the orange t-shirt I was wearing, and started running back east the way I’d came.  There weren’t any shots, but the thought crossed my mind that they might be sending someone out to check on me.

I didn’t intend to be there when they got to my bike.  I did recall seeing another small creek about half a mile back.  I trotted in the pasture until I got there.  I noticed my legs were itching, and looked down.  Evidently I’d jogged through a batch of stick tights, and my jeans and socks were covered in at least three different types of them:  devil’s claw, cocklebur, and burr-grass.

No time to deal with that now.  I kept going.

I followed the stream bed, attempting to keep my feet on the flat sandstone slabs in the creek bed.  As I got a half a mile away, I stopped.  I’d built up a lot of heat under the plastic poncho, and I pulled it off.  I then took the multi-tool from my pack and started pulling the stick tights out of my pants.  Eventually I gave up and took the pants and socks off so I could pull all of them out.  It took about 20 minutes, and I heard no pursuit, but that didn’t surprise me.

I imagined that whoever shot at me wasn’t going to follow very far.  They’d made their point.  I wondered what had caused them to behave that way?  My only guess was that they were pretty close to the city, and that someone had decided to do a joy ride in an older car that still worked after the EMP, and had brought the city fathers together in a posse to protect the approaches to the town.

I got finished with sticker duty, and it was now about 2pm.  I kept following the riverbank south, until I hit a railroad – which was headed due east.  Right where I wanted to be going.  If followed the railroad tracks, walking briskly, until I saw the Interstate.  The Interstate crossed over the railroad, and then the railroad crossed over the last big river between here and home.  I decided not to linger on the highly visible railway – I decided to keep jog as fast as possible under the Interstate and over the river.

Nothing.  Today.  Tomorrow?  I imagine a bright boy at the city that was defending the Interstate would see this as a vulnerability that they’d have to solve and place a fire team to cover the bridge.

As it was, I made it past the bridge, and kept walking on sparsely populated farm roads well into the night.  I avoided the two medium-sized towns, and then about 2AM, decided make a small fire about two miles from the nearest farmhouse in a small grove of trees and sleep.

I was exhausted.  I was, I guessed, 75 miles from home.  I missed the bike very much – I’d be four or five hours from home, at most.  Now?  A day?  Two days of walking?

That seemed like forever, especially on a day where I’d been shot at the first time in my life.  What would happen next?  I slept, and the rough ground wasn’t an issue.  I was exhausted.

### (Until Next Monday)

I’ve never been shot at.  But one thing that I’ve been told is, “don’t point a gun at someone unless you’re ready to shoot at them.”  I think this would be the rule in a catastrophic collapse, and also in the event that we have the long, slow collapse or civil insurrection I’m actually expecting.  Eventually, we’ll get there if things go south.

But why did we get in the story to the point where people, namely your protagonist, were getting shot at so quickly?

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My thoughts are that being close to a big city when things collapse is like having a Martian death-ray pointed at your head.  People in big cities are barely under control when the economy is booming, the benefits are flowing, and the cops are out in force.  The cops won’t be at work long during a collapse scenario – they’ll be protecting their family, not yours – that’s backed up by recent experience during hurricanes like hurricane Katrina.

John Wesley, Rawles wrote about this and uses the metaphor of “The Golden Horde.”  Yes, I know there’s an odd comma in there, and no, it’s not a typo.  It’s the way Mr. Rawles chooses to do his name – ask him, not me.  Anyway, his quote on the subject from his blog (LINK) is:

As the comfort level in the cities rapidly drops to nil, there will be a massive involuntary outpouring from the big cities and suburbs into the hinterboonies. This is the phenomenon that my late father, Donald Robert Rawles–a career particle physics research administrator at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories–half-jokingly called “The Golden Horde.” He was of course referring to the Mongol Horde of the 13th Century, but in a modern context. (The Mongol rulers were chosen from the ‘Golden Family’ of Temujin. Hence the term “The Golden Horde.”) I can remember as a child, my father pointing to the hills at the west end of the Livermore Valley, where we then lived. He opined: “If The Bomb ever drops, we’ll see a Golden Horde come swarming over those hills [from Oakland and beyond] of the like that the world has never seen. And they’ll be very unpleasant, believe you me!”

And I think that Mr. Rawles is right.  And the operative distance where the Golden Horde will show up?  About a half a gas tank.  That’s, on average, how much will be in a tank.  So, if you’re more than 150 miles from a major city, that’s a start.  I cannot stress enough that this is the biggest threat that anyone can conceive of during a collapse.

Most people aren’t 150 miles from a city.  And the people 40 miles due south of the big city, in this case several hundred thousand people?  They’ll get hit early, and hard.  In this fictional state, they’re also armed.  You won’t be coming down the Interstate to get them.  The tractors will pull cars to block the exits, and nothing will get off the Interstate alive.  Country boys aren’t necessarily great at long shots of 500 yards plus, but they will learn very quickly.  And they won’t waste ammo on warning shots.  The dead body in the road will be the warning.  Or they could just post a sign that says “no PEZ® this exit” – that might work as well.

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So why did they shoot at fictional me?  They probably got a dose of the Golden Horde early.  And a dose of people coming to your town with no good intent would make you distrust almost everyone you didn’t personally know.  The closer you are, the more intense the outbound pressure will be.  And normal people living in the cities will do almost anything once they realize the old rules are gone and the new ones won’t be coming back.  I think it will take longer in the suburbs where the nuclear family with the 2.1 kids feel that they have too much to lose and will be certain that the old times will be coming back.

When they lose it, and start hiking or driving out?  Ouch.

But more about that next Monday, probably.  Or the Monday after that.  But definitely probably next Monday.

I have a knapsack in every car that I drive over 20 miles from home.  In each of these knapsacks I have a Lifestraw®.  I have no idea if they work well, other than the Internet, which says that they’re pretty good.  But the nice thing is that they’re $20, which allows me to have three of them for $60, and that’s less than a single water filtration pump.  Of which I also have three four.  Water is important.  It’s not as good as beer, wine, or whiskey, but it’s still important.

Which brings up another point – if your life is on the line, redundancy is key.  “Two is one and one is none,” is the phrase most commonly used among preppers.  And it makes sense.  You’re entering an environment where every preconception you had about life has been shattered.  Constitutional rights?  Probably not a big selling point for the Warlord Trevor from Brentwood.  Having several ways to get water makes sense.

I actually have one of those camouflage ponchos mentioned above in each of my packs.  I bought them for about $16, and they were pretty thick stuff.  My theory if you’re using the emergency bag is you’re either wanting to be seen (most likely) or not wanting to be seen (EMP level stuff).  The ponchos are good.  They have multiple purposes.  And when you put them on, you’re invisible!

Okay, you’re not invisible.  But when you properly use camouflage, you’re horribly hard to see.  I can attest to being shocked during a paintball game when a camouflaged friend stepped out of a tree and I had NO idea he was there.  And he was 20 feet from me.  And I was looking for him.  Camouflage, properly used, is like magic.  And they are really good at keeping you dry.

Which is good, but invisible would be better if people were shooting at you.

Heck, invisible would be awesome most days.  Then I could sneak into the snack room at work and not feel guilty about eating a whole donut, rather than cutting one in half.  Who am I kidding?  I don’t feel guilty about taking the last cup of coffee.  Why would I feel guilty about taking the last doughnut?  It’s JUNGLE RULES!

Bigfoot, Aliens, Farrah Fawcett, and the Guide to Real Inner Peace

“I have droppings of someone who saw bigfoot.” – Futurama

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I think this happened to me in the summer of 1982, but I don’t remember when, or where I was.  Pictured (green abductor):  Brett Kavanaugh. 

I was staring straight up at the ceiling in my bedroom, under the seven* heavy quilts that made the -40°F nights comfortable in my unheated** bedroom, every muscle tense.  This was what terror felt like.

I had seen him, or at least his glowing red eyes, on the small hill that was visible 1,175 feet from my bedroom window.  And I knew that he was headed toward me.  I knew that he had seen me.

I couldn’t see him headed toward me since I was too scared to look out the window, but I knew his inhuman, ground-devouring strides would be taking him to my window soon enough.  And then?  What would he do?

I gradually fell asleep, as the adrenaline drained from my nine-year-old bloodstream.  I remember wondering as I dozed off how exactly I knew that the hill was exactly 1,175 feet from my back window, and then I remembered.  Google® Maps™.

Okay, I didn’t know that it was 1,175 feet from my window until just now when I measured it on Google® Maps©.  But it was uncomfortably close.

What, though, was it?

It was bigfoot.  I had been reading a UFO magazine that day.  The UFO magazine had several helpful facts for me:

  1. Bigfoot was, in fact, not a creature from Earth at all.   Bigfoot was an alien.
  2. Bigfoot was a psychic alien.
  3. Bigfoot, the psychic alien, had glowing red eyes.
  4. Bigfoot was known to inhabit the hills near where I lived. Since I lived in the hills – the exact hills the little gray and white map in the pulp UFO magazine had shaded as “high bigfeet activity areas associated with alien psychic bigfeet that will probably kill, dismember, and eat wee John Wilder in his sleep, and if he’s lucky, in that order.”
  5. Okay, the graph didn’t say they would kill, dismember and eat people, but it did talk about increasing incidents of violence against people.

So, I was a little tired when I went off to school the next day.  Thankfully, I also concluded that the glowing red eyes might have been something else, like a reflection in the window.  Or maybe that was a memory that psychic bigfoot put into my nine-year-old brain?

Really, it had been quite a long time since I was allowed to be scared, specifically since the night when I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door at 2AM and Pop Wilder made it clear that my presence was no longer requested at 2AM waking him up because I was scared.  At that point, I became more afraid of what Pop Wilder would do to me versus anything a psychic bigfoot could do.  Besides, I was sure Pop Wilder was real.

Alien psychic bigfeet?  Not so sure that they existed.

UFOFarrah

Farrah kept me safe from the bigfeet.  And made me feel real funny when I was 13.

Honestly, after this one night of terror I didn’t give bigfoot a whole lot of thought.  My focus shifted to girls, where huge feet and lots of hair wasn’t exactly a selling point for me.

sexybigfoot

Words only a teenage male bigfoot would type into Google®.

So, I grew up.  Then one day, I heard the words again . . . Alien Psychic Bigfoot.

The Mrs. and I were travelling across country, and listening to a radio program as we drove through a cool high desert night.  A guest was on talk radio, patiently explaining that he was a bigfoot researcher, but more specifically, a bigfoot researcher that had the theory that bigfoot wasn’t a critter, it was, instead, a some sort of alien creation, just like in the UFO magazine from my youth.

But it gets better.

You’d think that the biggest enemy of bigfoot researchers would be skeptics?  No.

The biggest enemy of bigfoot researchers is . . . bigfoot researchers that have a different theory than them.

So, if you’re in the “bigfoot is just an animal that we haven’t found conclusive evidence for yet” camp then your biggest enemy is the “bigfoot is a psychic alien” guy.

And vice versa.

This makes me laugh, inside.  But it’s a truism of life.  When people believe in something, their biggest enemy isn’t someone who doesn’t believe, it’s someone who believes, but just a little bit differently than them, most often over something that doesn’t have any real bearings on the truth of their belief.

I was talking about a particular Christian denomination with a friend.

He asked, “Are they dunkers or splashers?”  Dunkers are those that baptize by immersing the baptized into water, while splashers use a Papal-Approved® Super-Soaker™ to baptize.

I replied, “I have no idea.”

“It’s important, you know.”

And that’s always amused me – the biggest fights are about the smallest things, often with the people that are closest to you in belief.

So I guess that’s the thing that I learned when alien psychic bigfoot held me in its hairy loving arms:  love one another – it’s the only way to get to a true inner and outer peace.  Except for the “bigfoot is just a critter we don’t have proof of” people – don’t love them.  They’re awful.***

To be clear, I do not claim to have seen a real bigfoot.  I also do not claim to have seen a UFO, except the band, UFO, and them only on YouTube®.

*Yes.  Seven is an excessive number of quilts.  It was also quite warm.

**The bedroom was unheated because I turned off the electric baseboard heaters, and, in an escalating war with Ma Wilder, I eventually flipped the breakers off.  Eventually she got the message.  I like/liked it cold.  I even had the windows cracked sometimes when it was below zero.  I was an awful child.

***Just kidding.  I don’t really care.  My current bet is they’re both wrong.

Seven Deadly (Financial) Sins, Together For The FIRST TIME!

“Deserves got nothing to do with it.” – Unforgiven

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Actually not my favorite Clint Eastwood movie.  That would be Outlaw Josey Wales, or ANYTHING he did in the 1970’s.  But I do know my limitations . . . .

When it comes to my life, I’ve made mistakes, like convincing George W. Bush to attack Iraq.  I should have remembered – never get involved in a land war in Asia.  But those mistakes aren’t the ones we’re discussing today.  Today . . . we’re discussing the Seven Deadly Financial Sins, at least after I put on some spooky music to scare you into never sinning.  Oh, I did discuss the Actual Seven Deadly Sins, and you can read that post here (The seven deadly sins and society. How do they fit together?).

We’ll start with the worst sin:

Debt

Is debt a sin or the result of sinning?  I’m not going to sit and argue it – these aren’t really sins you go to Actual Hell for anyway.  You just go to Financial Hell.  So, I’m calling Debt a sin.  And I’m calling it a result of sin.  It’s the “Y” of Sin – sometimes a vowel, sometimes not.

Debt is really, really bad for individuals.

Why?

With debt, you get what you want, now.  Like a brand new Corvette®, or a rare 1621 A.D. PEZ® dispenser originally whittled by Galileo while he was in prison for stealing cable television.   I’m sure that was the best deal I’ve ever made, only had to pay $500 for it!

But now you have the object of your desire.  And you have to pay for it.  That’s not a problem.  You only borrowed $50,000 for the Corvette™, right.  You’ll pay (for a seven year loan) about $680 a month at 4% interest.  Not bad!

But of that, your first payment will contain around $170 in interest, money that you’re paying the bank, every month.  $1,800 in interest in the first year.  The total interest you’d pay in this situation is $7,400 over the life of the loan.

Now let’s say you buy a house for the average price in the country, $200,000.  Your payment on a 30 year loan would be a little more than $1000 for principle and interest, with a whopping $750 of that being interest in the first month.  In the first year?  About $8,800 in interest payments alone.

Sure, you have a house and a car, but you’re paying nearly $1000 a MONTH just to borrow the money in the early parts of the loan.

How much income would be required to fund this?  Your tax rates will vary, but I’ll assume your tax rate leaves you with about 70% of your money after you’ve paid all of your taxes.

$17,000 in pre-tax income would be required . . . just for your interest payments.  Toss in the principle, the taxes and insurance?

$50,000 in pre-tax income to pay for taxes, insurance, and the full payments.  Some people work a whole week and don’t make that much money!

If you make the median family income of $59,000, you have the princely sum of $9,000 before taxes ($6,300 after taxes) a year to buy absolutely everything else in your life.

“Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage:   Pay cash or do without.  Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity.” – Robert A. Heinlein

Is there a place for debt?  Sure.  Businesses use it to expand.  Families use it to create a reason to divorce.  Or buy a really cool PEZ® dispenser.

The least bad debt?  Mortgage debt.

Worse?  Credit cards.

Worst?  Student loan debt or money you owe to mobsters.  But I repeat myself.

Have I sinned?  Yes, I have.  But that day in January of 2001 when I paid off my last non-mortgage debt except for student loans?

Priceless.  And marriage harmony went up 41.7% that day.

Fear

Had I continually invested all of my spare cash into the market, say in a nice S&P 500 fund?  The cash that’s sitting in the bank, gathering only a little interest?

I’d be retired today.  Smoking nice cigars and drinking good scotch.  With an airplane.  A cheap one, but an airplane.

Dang.

I’ve successfully predicted 11 of the last three recessions.  That may not be the most useful talent I have.  I will note that I at least come by it honestly.  One set of great-great-grandparents decided that they wanted to get out of Germany because they saw the increasing militarism in society and figured that war was coming, so they’d get out before it got bad.

They left Germany in 1880, 34 years before World War I and assimilated the heck out of themselves – one of them was Eisenhower’s grade school teacher – how American was that?

I’ve said before that being right too early is the same as being wrong, but in this case?  I have all of my cash.  And my great-great-grandparents avoided the mess that was post World War I Germany, where, I hear, the Internet was horrible.

Greed

Okay, I did play with some great stocks during the teens.  Several of them doubled within a month of me buying them.  And I kept riding some of them right into the ground.  I turned $20,000 into $40,000 into $5,000.  Which will be a great tax write off, when I finally sell it.  Will someone please cue the sound of a forehead repeatedly hitting a desk?

Waste

In a recent post, I mentioned that the most expensive food is the food you don’t eat.  I’ve done the math:  when we go out to eat at Taco Bell®, we spend around $40.  How much steak does $40 buy?  A lot.  How much steak gets wasted around the Casa Wilder?

Zero.

And we can’t eat steak every day.  I mean we could, but we can’t.  But when we have to throw out food, I feel horrible.  Maybe it was the way that Great Grandma McWilder would talk about how fortunate we were to NOT BE STARVING when I wasn’t finishing lunch.

And Great Grandma McWilder came through the Depression on the “nearly having to eat your shoes” side, so she knew how to put a guilt on you.  And waste was the sin that she preached against daily.  In her house, it if had any use?  She’d save it and use it.  Thankfully she didn’t die in her sleep and eat me (Sleep Deprivation, Health, Zombies, and B-Movies).

That would have been one big waste of an amazing blogger . . . .

Lust

I think the most evil word in the English language is “deserve.”

  • “You deserve a nice car.”
  • “You deserve health care that someone else pays for.”
  • “You deserve that stereo – you work so hard.”

When raising my kids, I wouldn’t allow them to use that word.  When you do, you create a foundation for your desire for an item, which in Actual Sin terms would be Lust.

Needs

Modern life has increased the level of needs that we have in an amazing fashion.  If you look at the following list:

  • Electricity
  • Internet
  • Phone Service
  • Mobile Phones
  • Natural Gas
  • Multiple Cars for a House
  • Cars
  • PEZ®
  • Air Conditioning
  • Netflix©
  • Facebook™
  • Faster Than Light Travel
  • Wireless Keyboards

None of those things were invented before last Thursday.

Okay, they were here last Thursday.  But how many on them didn’t exist before 1990?  Before 1950?  Before 1900?

These things aren’t needs.  They’re nice – some of them amazingly nice.  You can live amazingly well without them, as humanity did forever before 1900.

Reassess your needs** – not only of the services above, but of anything that doesn’t make your life better.  Half the games that are available on the smart phone are designed to sell you or sell something to you.  Either way?  You lose.  Except for Candy Crush®.  That’s just fun*.

*I have never played Candy Crush™.

**If you don’t want to have electricity and your wife disagrees, it would amuse me if you used me as a source.  It would NOT amuse me if she came to my house to complain.

Sloth

I’d write more about this . . . but I’m just not feeling it.

Just kidding.

Don’t ignore your money or financial situation if you’re lazy, like me.  I put in place systems so I wouldn’t forget to pay bills monthly.

It’s a secret, but I’ll tell you because, you know, we’re cool, right?

It’s a calendar.

Pay your bills on time.

Otherwise?

You get what you deserve, which will be penalties, fees, and interest.  You can use deserve in this case.  Because you deserve it.

Sinner.

TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!

“I thought I was prepared.  I knew the theory, I . . . reality’s different.” – Interstellar

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Heh heh.  During the hurricane we were in, I think we gained weight.

This is part III of a series of life after an Electromagnetic Pulse Takes down much of the electronics that form the systems that allow us to live our lives in the relative luxury we have today . . . part I is here (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You) and part II is here (Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word)).  As always, comments on inaccuracies are welcome – I’ve learned quite a bit about our systems writing these, and love getting the feedback to make them more realistic.

Okay, back to the story . . . our hero has realized that an EMP has occurred, secured transportation, and is heading home.

THE TOWN HAD BEEN quiet as I had pedaled through.  Not many people are out at 3am, and almost none of them are happy about it.  In a town this size, I bet there wasn’t more than one cop on duty when the power went away.

The wind was at my back, and a pretty stiff one today.  It was okay.  The road was clear of traffic and there’s a stillness when you’re going the same speed as the wind.  It’s odd – you are travelling at 20 miles per hour (same as the wind), but there is not a hint of wind.  It’s also nice, because when you bicycle in cool air, your feet and hands get very cold.  Because you’re going with the wind, you can hear much better than someone just standing outside in the wind – your senses aren’t supernatural, but it certainly feels that way.

South out of town with the north wind at my back, I thought about the trip ahead.  I’d become so used to using either my phone for a map or the GPS that I knew there wasn’t one in the car.  It had been a long time since I’d seen a map in a convenience store.  Heck, it had been a long time since I’d seen a magazine in one.  But the trip ahead was fairly simple – head south and then head east.  That was where home was.

There was one big city between here and home – hundreds of thousands of people.

And that was the danger.  It wasn’t cold.  It wasn’t planes falling from the sky.  It was people.  And there were, probably, about a million between me and home.  The last thing I wanted to do was to go through them, even if I could do it today before things became really chaotic.

My bet was that I could head south and then loop around to the east.  From memory, there weren’t many people at all along that route, and if I could make 120 miles or so, I could turn east.

And it was mostly quiet.

For the most part, all of the little towns I passed through might have a gas station and a small diner, but the route I was on was pretty unpopulated.

About hour two, or forty miles according to the mile markers, I heard a low rumbling off to the east.  I pulled the bike to a stop and looked.  A small, bright orange spot was visible on the horizon, with a thick, black cloud beginning to form above it.

I pulled a water bottle out of my backpack and took a long drink.  Nice thing about the day being cool was the water was cool, too, about 60°F.

I wondered for a second on what could have caused the explosion on the horizon.  I vaguely recalled that there was a crude oil refinery off in that direction.  Yeah, that was probably it.  Refineries are run very efficiently, and lots and lots of automated valves and switches and such allowed them to run with only a few people.  But all of those were electronic.  Looks like something failed.

As I watched, in fairly quick succession I saw two more fireballs.  I straddled my bike and waited.  About a minute and a half later, I heard the twin rumbles from the new explosions.  Fifteen miles?  Twenty?  Certainly far enough that I don’t have to worry about hazardous vapors on this trip.  I put the bottle back in my pack and continued pedaling.  There are things I can fix and things I can’t.  Exploding refineries after an EMP were definitely in the latter category.

Most of the small towns had forgettable names and were so small that I was through them in three or four blocks, and they looked mostly deserted, though I did see smoke from quite a few chimneys.  The strength in this area, at least, is that most of the actual homes (versus the trailer homes) were built back before piped in natural gas, before electricity.  They’d be warm, as long as the inhabitants had wood to burn.  Of course, there’d be house fires as chimneys not used in decades were used by people who’d not used a fireplace or woodstove in as many decades.

At last I came to a big enough city that I’d heard the name before.  It looked to be a mile or so on a side.  I decided it was a city that was big enough that I didn’t want to risk going through it.

I decided to skirt it to the east – it looked like the most of the city was to the west of the road that I was on, so, a quick detour a mile west might be all that I needed to do.

After going a mile east, I turned south again.  A mile later?  I was staring at a dead end, caused by a river.

It was noon.  I had two options.  I could head back to the city, where I was reasonably certain that there was a bridge, or I could head farther east, where, in sparsely populated country like this I might not see another bridge for miles.

I decided to chance the city.  It was small, I told myself, and a lone guy on a bicycle wasn’t much of a threat, right?  Although my legs were getting a bit tired (I hadn’t biked in three years) I felt a surge of adrenaline as I neared the city.  I got up speed.  It turned out this road entered the city right at the bridge.  There were a few people at the bridge, but no physical barriers or any sort of road block.  There were a few shouted questions “Hey, what’s going on out there?” as I went by, but that was all.  I just smiled and waved.

I noticed some of the men were armed, but nobody raised a weapon toward me as I headed away from the town.

I kept on going south without further incident.  I headed east, more or less directly toward home after I’d gone about 120 miles south.  No hypotenuse for me.  Straight south, then straight east.

I turned east in another quiet, small town.  I pedaled with the mild evening wind for about an hour until I came to a small streambed.

It was secluded, three miles since the last house, and there were trees all around the stream.  Good.  I found firewood, plus a small, secluded grassy patch.  I got some small sticks, and piled up some of the sandstone from the creek bed for a fire ring.  I pulled out my knife and turned one stick into a “fuzz stick” – a lot of small, shallow cuts into the stick, leaving the wood together so that it looked like a fuzzy stick when done.  If you don’t have paper – it’s a great way to start a fire since it has so much surface area.  I also gathered handfuls of dried, dead grass (easy to find in February!) and added in some very small sticks.

fuzz_sticks

If you don’t have lots of matches, make each one count.  Spend the time preparing to make the fire before you strike the match.  And I had no idea if I could even make it home in three days.  A big snowstorm might set me back for days, or weeks.  And how many matches did we have at home?  It was time to save them all.

The small fire was nice.  I’m not sure if it was the light or the warmth, but it was pleasant, unlike my butt, which was very sore, and I’m sure I’d feel fire in my legs tomorrow.  As I went to sleep that night in my makeshift tarp-tent, I was completely unaware that this would be my last completely peaceful day until I got home.

### (until next Monday)

The first day after a catastrophe like this is bound to be filled with a tremendous amount of inaction – nobody will know quite what to do.  Everyone will walk by the switch on the wall and flip it, expecting, believing that the light will come on.  We’ve been conditioned for that.  Ultimately, the vast majority of people will believe that things will return to normal, even when it’s clear that they never will.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks in his book The Black Swan about how his family talks about what they’ll do when Lebanon returns to normal, which at this point no one thinks will ever happen, even though the Civil War that tore Lebanon apart started in 1975, 43 years ago.  Lebanon had been one of the most advanced countries on earth, but now large areas of the country are considered “no go” for almost anyone with a modicum of sanity.  But people expect that one day . . . it will return to normal.

This is wonderful.  If the lights are going to come back on, slaughtering that neighbor that played the music really loud (Bon Jovi?  Really?) while you were trying to sleep is a bad idea.  If the lights are done?  So is that neighbor.  Scores will be settled, especially if it involves Bon Jovi.

During that first day, people will begin to understand that maybe this catastrophe is different.  Outside of every catastrophe that has hit the United States in history, this one isn’t regional.  90% of the unaffected population won’t be available to turn to for help, which happens today after a hurricane or volcano or Rosie O’Donnell-created earthquake.

A regional incident means that the region is going to be helped.  A national or global event?  You’re on your own.  Every rule changes.  Think you own that second house down by the lake?  I think the family that moved into it might not care.  And neither will the sheriff.

But there is one place where the time delay between civilization and Mad Max® level insanity is thinnest:

Modern cities.

Win a sports title in a modern city and you can be happy if only two people are killed and the arson is limited to a small area near downtown.  The larger the city, the quicker the violence hits, and the more violent it will be.  Google® “Selco” if you want to hear the grim stories from his survival in the cities during the Balkans War in the 1990’s.  And those were cities that had spent years under the Communist® system with people who were used to working around failing systems.  Imagine Baltimore when things go really bad?

Again, in a catastrophe like this – avoid cities and other people at all costs.

I hinted around that there are other infrastructure pieces that will have issues after an EMP.  Refineries, pipelines, and power plants are absolutely dependent upon control systems that pull data from the boiling oil or high pressure natural gas and use it to make decisions. Many times those decisions are made at millisecond speed via computer without any input from a human required.  And without those systems?  At best, the pipelines and refineries and power plants won’t work.  At worst?  Systems that are used for safety won’t work.  Normally, everything is designed to go to a safe state.  But those safe states often rely on there being power, even battery power.  There will be some failures in those safety systems.  If we’re lucky, it just wrecks equipment, and not result in huge fireballs.

Nuclear power plants are a special case (and not in a good way), which we’ll discuss in a future post.

Oh, and the fuzz stick thing?  It works really well.

Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg

“That’s not an argument, that’s just contradiction.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

argue

Hmm, I’ll have what he’s having.

Wilder Note:  Normally, Friday posts (for the last 70 or so weeks) have been devoted to health topics.  I figure why not make everyone feel thoughtful right before the weekend, rather than guilty on a Monday for eating a whole cake and two tubs of Betty Crocker® frosting on Saturday night while drinking enough chardonnay to dull the pain from having lost that stupid election to that stupid guy from New York.  Oops, too personal?  Anyway, as the TEOWAWKI series has gone from one post to maybe weeks and weeks of posts (in outline) that I realized I’d put a topic on the back burner that I really want to write about and it really fits the “big ideas” Monday slot that’s now been invaded by the End Of The World, well, Fridays had to give.  So until The End Of The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTEOWAWKI – top, that Internet!), Friday posts may or may not be related directly to health for the next few months.  This one isn’t.

Here are the links to the TEOWAKI posts (for now):

Now on to Friday’s first Big Ideas post:

I’ve written before about how it seems that our culture is unraveling around us at an increasing rate.  You can see those posts here:

Is there any data to back up these theories?

Yes.

I originally thought that the Pew Research Center primarily did research into the sounds that kids made while using finger guns.   These are sounds like Pew, Pew, Pew, Bang-Bang, and Rat-a-Tat-Tat.  I was informed that finger guns are now illegal because they can be easily concealed and have far too large of an ammunition capacity, needing to be reloaded only when “making a shotgun loading sound” would be cool.

It turns out Pew does research on social and political trends, which is maybe more important than finger gun noises, but far less fun.  And political trends wasn’t even my second theory, which included fart and skunk smell research.  But Pew put together one report titled “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider (LINK)” that’s especially relevant in describing what’s going on in American life today.  The excellent blog Epsilon Theory (LINK) had a post that referenced the Pew Report, which is how I found it, and it fit perfectly with the posts we’ve been doing about the dissolution of the American political scene, though I think we come to different conclusions on what will ultimately happen.

Imagine how happy I was to see yet more proof of my theory that everything is falling straight apart and that millions of Americans will, within my lifetime, be engaged in bloody civil war!

Let’s start with the big graph.  It tells (broadly) the story.

pewpewpew

1994

In 1994, sure we had differences, but mainly we had more in common than divided us.  Going through the numbers, Democrats and Republicans broadly agreed that illegal immigration was, well, illegal and was a thing to be stopped.  Also about this time, Bill Clinton got punched in the teeth when he lost the House of Representatives by trying to go too far left too fast.

Bill’s response was to take the position of the Republicans and the position of the Democrats and steer between them.  Republican points that were really popular, like making welfare recipients work?  Adopt it.  There was a vast overlap in the center – the overlap between Republican and Democrat is significant.  The results of this policy were also pretty significant – this tension actually restrained government spending for the first time since Andrew Jackson made Congress personally count out every expenditure in piles of nickels on the Senate floor.

I remember being at a political rally for Democrats at around this point in time (1994, not during the Jackson administration).  It was a big rally – Carrie Fisher was there with the Democratic candidate in question.  So was I – with a sign for the Republican opposition.  We didn’t go into the rally, but stood on one side of a driveway while a small group of Democrats stood on the other side.  There were 50 to 100 in either group.  We yelled at each other, each making fun of the other’s candidate, but the yelling was light hearted and humorous.  Everyone had fun.  I think I saw Carrie Fisher’s leg.

At that point in time, there was more extremism on the right than on the left, but even that wasn’t pronounced.  With the defeat of Evil Communism, well, life was good.  Heck, a guy named Francis Fukuyama even said that The End of History was at hand.  Western liberal democracy would be the final form of government in a more peaceful world where capitalism was pretty significant feature.

2004

Not too far past 9/11, Americans had something that kept them unified – war.  It appears that several people skipped reading Fukuyama’s book.   At this point, a feeling of cohesion in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was still evident, W reluctantly called legitimate.  Americans are actually politically closer than in 1994, but now more extreme leftists than extreme right wing folks.  When Bush beat Kerry?  Meh.  No protests.  No outrage.  Bush personified the center.  But the far left wing was growing.

pewtwo

2017

Democrats have all scampered left.  Far left.  Republicans have moved right certainly, but not nearly as far as the Democrats have moved left.

How bad is it?

pewthree

97% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.  95% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat.  Yes, there’s still overlap, but rapidly we’re nearing the point where we don’t even recognize the same facts.  Imagine how little regard there is for the opinions of the other side.

And it’s worse with the media.  As a whole, they’ve been leftists since . . . forever.  But now?  Not only do Republicans represent less than 7% of journalists, the places where journalists work and live are in big cities where people wearing Make America Great Again hats are shot on site.  Or they would be if the leftists currently believed in individual, rather than state gun ownership.

The media are ideologically leftists, and live in cities where they might not even see a Republican in a day.  They work in a bubble (leftist journalists) and live in a bubble (leftist cities and often states) and have no conception that people on the right exist.  This explains why, on election night, the media was stunned that Trump won.  They didn’t even try to hide their bias and dismay.  Rachel Maddow alone cried enough tears to create minor flooding in the basement of the broadcast building.

There is simply very little the median Democrat has to say to the median Republican beyond “give me your stuff”, and little the median Republican has to say to the median Democrat other than “no, there aren’t 621 genders and 627 on Saturday night.”  They don’t even speak the same language and in some cases this is literally true.

Part of the shift has come because the composition of American has changed.  First and second generation immigrants are now roughly 25% of voters, a far higher proportion than at any time in history.  And 70% of immigrants are leftist, compared to 18% that tend toward the right.  This makes sense – most immigrants come to the United States from countries that are far to the left of the United States.  I remember listening to the radio where a left-wing journalist was gushing with enthusiasm that a communist (literally and self-described) woman from India had been elected to the Seattle city council.  When you talk about foreign influence on politics, well, the immigrants that are here legally have distorted politics and added to the overall polarization.  This explains why the right has fought back so strongly – they (correctly) sense that the immigration desired by the left will disenfranchise (forever) their entire political ideology.  If Hispanics voted on for the right, Republicans would have put forth the Everybody’s Really An American plan and the Democrats would have put forth a bill to mine the border with giant radioactive scorpions on either side of the 500 foot deep pit.

It also explains why so many Democrats (and Independents) have (quietly) defected to the Republican side.  The party is moving away from them.

And the extreme left turn of the Democrats explains why Alexwhatshername Occasionally-Cortez, who is running on an actual and explicit socialist platform is the future of the Democratic party, not an outlier – this is the type of person that will win primaries as the Democrats float left.  And I think the Republicans will continue to float farther right, which, in time, will make Trump look like a moderate.

cortez

What happens when/if the next leftist gains the White House?

Whiplash on every conceivable policy, but with a side order of vengeance.  And a system like that will produce, rather inevitably, an economic dislocation, a government crackdown.  A step too far.

This will be the spark.

And there will be war.  If the United States weren’t so divided, the war could be external as politicians looked to focus people against the outside to reunify the country.  But for now, we couldn’t even agree on a common enemy.  So our enemy will be . . . us.

But, hey, cake is out of the oven!  Who wants cake?  I even have some spare tubs of frosting . . .

Readers Write: Early Retirement, Health Care, Canada, and Averting A Ben Affleck Marathon

Ricky:  Boys, what is up with me getting shot with three darts, and it didn’t even affect me?  I must be like a superhero or something.

Julian:  Maybe you’ve got so much dope in your system, you’re immune, Rick.

– Trailer Park Boys

DSC00043

See, your health care dollars are being spent on useless signs!  An outrage!

It’s always nice to get feedback about the column in a letter that doesn’t begin with an anatomical impossibility.  I mean, how would my head even have gotten in there in the first place?  And what does my mother have to do with anything?  But, I thought this would be a great chance to take a few excerpts from the letter and mix with other communications I’ve had to revisit the topics of early retirement and health care from last week (Early Retirement: Things to Consider (cough Health Care cough)).

Comments in quotes are from my friend.  Comments in [brackets] are from me.  Comments in purple are a figment of your imagination.  You should talk to someone or cut back on the recreational stuff.

“So, I laughed when I read this post yesterday.  I’ve been spinning off after reading the NY Times article on the FIRE movement and Mr. Money Mustache and others – and wondered if you knew about them… of course you did!”

Yes.  John Wilder knows everything that a mortal man can know, with the exception of how to properly mud and tape drywall.  That’s magician/wizard-level skill.

“Since I’m new to MMM [Mr. Money Mustache – link to him here-JW] and others in the FIRE [Financially Independent, Retiring Early] community I was curious and excited, and then realized that I’ve known versions of people like this since my youth [but] they just seemed like weirdos at my parent’s church who recycled aluminum foil from pot luck dinners, rode tandem bikes to church, the husband hired himself out as a handyman outside his day job, and rode his bike to job site with his old timey tool box, etc.  They seemed cheap, not enlightened, but it looks like they were on to something!”

If you’re going to be rich, a good thing to be is . . . invisibly rich.  No private plane.  No flashy cars.  Just the satisfaction of knowing that you actually own the ’04 Ford™ Taurus© in the driveway of the nice but modest house.  And this avoidance of spectacle also tends to reinforce the concept of not being a slave to your desires or needs for consumer products.  Except for drones – you need a drone – life is not worth living without a drone.

I recall living in Houston and sitting at the stoplight in my three year old Ford® that I got for $12,000 (cash) next to a $180,000 Mercedes® SLWhateverX, and thinking . . . mine is paid for.  I don’t know if theirs was (my bet is that it wasn’t) but I knew that mine was.  And that I got to live with the lack of stress associated with no payments on a car.  I felt this way when I was driving $2000 Chevy™ Lumina©, too.

“While many [Early Retirement folks] got their start in higher paying professions like software engineering or investment banking, and then consciously live on 30-40% or less of their income, it does seem like a movement geared to minimalist millennials with few obligations.  I can live on 60% of my pay without dipping into savings, but much less isn’t possible with obligations of a relatively cheap [Expensive Home Area] mortgage, frequent trips to [Home Area], living in a 65 year old house, and maxing out 401K contributions.”

Yes.  Agreed – at various stages of my life I’ve been down to my last $50 in the checking account – with a pretty hefty negative net worth.  And, yes, obligations cost money.  But almost all of the obligations we take on are (outside of death, child support, alimony, and taxes – but I repeat myself) voluntary servitude.  And it’s okay, as long as you realize that the servitude was entered into . . . voluntarily.  Unless there was tequila involved and she looked pretty after enough of it.  Thankfully, since 2005 or so, I’ve been on the other end of it (wealth, not tequila goggles), but in large part that was due to severing that voluntary servitude, either through paying down debt (student loans) or not getting into debt (new cars).

“[Specific Investment Stuff] Plus, I like what I do and where I live.  [More Specific Investment Stuff].”

This is the most important line in the letter.  If you love what you do, and like where you live, why would you even consider retiring early?  Financial independence is nice, but if you’re gonna keep working because you want to and can save a nice chunk of cash while fully funding a 401K, why bother hurrying it?

“[More Specific Investment Stuff and Personal Stuff] So how to build wealth when you still have obligations and don’t feel confident on putting your money to work in the market, or buying real estate in distant locations, etc.?”

Cash is a long term loser – but it sounds like you’re funding your 401K to nearly the max.  I’m not going to get into specific investment advice on the post (okay, ammunition, PEZ® and panty hose are always winners) but the first part of wealth is reduction in need.  Just like the most expensive food in the fridge is the food you throw out, the biggest wealth destroyer is stuff you don’t ever use.  Like that stupid drone.

And, as for wealth?  [Spoiler Alert] If we don’t fix health care, our financial system will implode (more below).  Oops.  Does that make me a Debbie Downer?  If so, do I have expanded restroom options?

“And then you hit the big nail on the head . . . “

Naturally.

“Health care.  Our system is a mess and many 30-somethings are choosing to go without coverage in order to save more.  That’s not an option at my age either, and I wonder how the FIRE folks living on the extreme cheap lifestyle will cope when they hit their 40’s and beyond as insurance rises beyond affordability.”

He ended with a note that certain countries seemed to like government-run health care.

To be as clear as I can be using the English language:  Like a Bush/Stalin lovechild, our hybridized system of health care combines the worst parts of rent-seeking crony capitalism and nanny-state big government socialism.

Let’s take the parts everyone likes:  Everyone must be treated at an emergency room regardless of ability to pay, government subsidies, and no pre-existing conditions.

Sure, everyone likes this!  Sounds compassionate (with other people’s money)!  Heck, if I were irresponsible, I’d like it, too.

But it sets up the system where emergency rooms are clogged with people with minor conditions because they can get free treatment.  It’s okay.  The people who actually pay bills to the hospitals can pay for them, too, right?  So, they pay for their care and the care of others.  But then they’re taxed so that they can pay for insurance for others.  And if there are no pre-existing conditions on health insurance, heck, don’t sign up until you get really sick or old, thus making insurance for people (like me) who have had it their entire lives amazingly expensive.  But it’s okay, the CIGNA health insurance company went from a high $20’s stock when Obamacare passed to a stock that is worth $200 today, a 600% to 700% increase.  Obamacare really stuck it to insurance companies.

No.  Insurance companies wrote Obamacare.  And don’t get me started on hospitals or prescription drug manufacturers.  While pretending to be a portion of the capitalist system, they really aren’t – they make use of government power to make rules that would be blatantly illegal for any other business.  Imagine a taking your car into the auto mechanic and getting a bill of $500 for a $5 belt.  Or a bill from a consulting mechanic who just walked by and asked if the car was doing okay.  And then drive off with the original problem not solved, and then bill your for your Taurus® giving birth to a Kia™, when everyone knows that a Taurus© identifies as male.

I don’t like socialism, but it appears we’ve socialized the responsibility while making the responsible pay with little to no benefit while corporate profits explode.

How does Canada do it?

In my YouTube® feed a video popped up about Canadian healthcare.  In it, a video pundit named Steven Crowder went to Canada and tried to obtain treatment (with his Canadian friend) for a variety of minor ailments.  No dice.  Hours waiting, and nada.  This is a similar story that I’d heard from others, so I thought I’d ask a friend who is Actually Canadian and eats nothing but back bacon while drinking Molson® and Moosehead™.

She loves their system.  Her mom had cancer, and got prompt treatments.  They even picked her mom up and dropped her off from her chemotherapy sessions.  And I hear if you’ve had a heart attack the system works very well.  And the care is good.

breakingcanada

This explains why the only good television from Canada is Trailer Park Boys.

But my friend also talked through the darker side that Crowder talked about – long waits – months for minor surgery like fixing a bum knee.  A full day to get a prescription for an ear infection.  Every system has a mechanism for rationing.  In a true capitalist system, it’s money.  In a socialist system, it’s something else.  In Canada?  Minor pain and time.  But like a year of minor pain – sort of like being forced to watch nothing but Ben Affleck movies for a solid year.

Are taxes higher?  Sure.  It isn’t a pure socialist system, and I haven’t dug into the darkest side, but socialized medicine eventually (as resources dwindle) becomes a game where resources are rationed more aggressively.  Except for the leaders – they still exempt for themselves the best of everything.

Canada’s system does have a safety valve – you can go to private clinics, too.  And pay cash to avoid the Affleckathon.

All of the above still sucks.  But it’s still better than the thing we have today.

But is there a capitalist solution?  Yeah.

I won’t go through the details, but Karl Denninger (LINK) has put together the “most” free-market alternative to our current system.  It doesn’t do like I would (letting folks die in the street is a big incentive to get insurance and drive costs down, plus it would mean much shorter lines at the checkout at WalMart®) but, would manage to save the financial system of the United States if implemented.  What would we lose?  High profits for insurance companies.  Huge numbers of bureaucrats.  High drug costs.  High insurance costs.

Do you lose exemptions for pre-existing conditions?  Yup.  But if you have insurance and have less than a 60 day lapse, those pre-existing conditions remain covered like they were in 2004.

It’s a good system, and necessary.  Because if we don’t fix healthcare?  It’s not gonna kill us.

It’s going to wreck the entire financial system of the United States, as I write about here (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck).

So, no biggie.

Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word)

“Look, any longer out on that road and I’m one of them, you know?  A terminal crazy, only I got a bronze badge to say I’m one of the good guys.” – Mad Max

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Before Hurricane Ike:  Looks like lemon cookies, Weight Watchers® and vegetables will be there after the apocalypse.  Also?  The wine section was empty.  No booze left in the entire store. 

This is part II of a story that begins at the start of a catastrophic collapse – you can find the first part here (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You).  It begins at 4AM, at the start of a blizzard on the East Coast.  Thankfully, your protagonist isn’t on the East Coast – but he is 252 miles from home, and most of the important electrical devices that he’s used to having are now (and forever more) inoperable.  Back to the hotel room:

I was now wide awake.  Soon my hotel room would be getting cool – thankfully not cold, it was 40°F outside and not colder.  But one thing I knew – it was going to get strange, and soon.

I got dressed and started to pack.  I assessed my belongings, and the things in the room.

Computers, phones, digital watch?  Useless.  I put them on the desk.  That would be as good a place to put useless things.  It’s odd, because before I went to sleep, those items were vital for me in the information they contained and the way I used them for work.  Now they were nothing but dead weight.

Thankfully, I had packed for winter – winter coat, gloves, and boots.  I also had my workout clothes and gym shoes.  I decided to keep them – I tossed them in my backpack.  I kept some paper and a pen and pencil.  Why?  Not sure.  The novel I was reading?  I hated to leave it, halfway finished.  But it was dead weight.

I looked at the room – there were two bottles of complementary water – I could use those.  I left the room, with a single knapsack, half full.  I was headed to Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart wasn’t exactly chaos – I had apparently gotten up fairly quickly – a few of the more enterprising employees had broken into the candles and matches and there were lights up and down the main aisles.  This was a 24-hour Wal-Mart, which meant that you could buy your Ol’ Roy dog food at 3AM as the stockers replenished the shelves for the next day.

I walked down the aisle towards the toy section, and took a right.  There they were – left over from Christmas.  Bikes.  Rows of them, all in a line – from small pink bikes with pink and glitter tassels up to off road bikes with big, fat tires.

I grabbed one of those – it was on the top shelf and pulled it on down.  I looked for a pull-behind cart, but I guessed that February wasn’t a strong month for pulling babies behind a bike in the Midwest, so I didn’t see one.  I looked at the bike accessories and found a repair kit, a bike bag that strapped to the handlebars, a dozen spare tires, and some of the goop that you can pop into a tire so that it re-seals after a thorn pops through the tube.  Oh, and a small bike pump.  Not much good to have a new tire but can’t inflate it.

I then dropped over into menswear – I grabbed a wool cap and scarf, some winder gloves, and thick wool socks, and then walked to the checkout line.  A single night manager was there.

“Sorry, man,” he said.  “I can’t do any transactions at all right now.”  He waved around the store.  Power’s out.

I laughed.  “Sure, I can see that!  But I have to get this stuff – it’s my boy’s birthday this morning,” I lied,” and my ex will use this against me in court if I forget to get him a present again.”

“Sorry, man, register is dead.  No can do.”  As I got closer I could see he was a younger man, early 20’s.  Probably pretty committed to Wal-Mart.

“Hey, I understand . . . I’ll go and put the stuff back.”  I started to head the other direction back into the darkened aisles of merchandise.

I turned back to face him.  “You know, there is another way.”  I pushed the bike and tossed the rest of the merchandise on the motionless belt.

“All of this stuff has UPC labels on it.  I can just cut them off, and pay you in cash now.  Then, when the registers come back on you can ring it up.”

His expression didn’t seem to be confident that this was a good plan.

“Tell you what – the bike was about $150.”

“$147.89,” he responded.

“Yup.  And all of the rest of this stuff is less than $200, total, right?”

He nodded.

“Cool.  That’s $350.  Here’s $500.  I’ll get you the UPCs from this, and then you can keep the change after you ring it up, and your inventory matches.  We good here?”

We were good.  Thankfully I generally traveled with a few hundred in cash, mainly for emergencies.  I had $100 left as I pushed the bike out of the side door – the one that wasn’t electric.

I walked the bike to my car, which was parked outside of the hotel.  I pressed the “door open” button on the key fob.  Nothing.  Which is what I expected.  I put my actual, physical key into the lock (which I hadn’t done for years with this car) and opened the door.

Just to be sure I tried to start the car – nothing, not a light, not a click.  Nothing.  I tried the headlights – oddly enough they worked, but none of the interior lights came on.  I turned off the headlights.  The trunk was entirely electric, so I had to pull the rear seatbacks down to get into the trunk.  I was plenty dark, but what I was looking for was just one bag.

For several years I’ve kept kits in every car that we own.  Simple stuff.  A compact blanket.  Waterproof matches and a lighter.  A small saw.  Fuel cubes meant for lighting a charcoal grill.  A water-purifying straw.  A tarp, and some concentrated food bricks.  A hatchet.  100 feet of parachute cord.  Two pocket knives.  Some carabiners.  Duct tape.  Stuff for when a day turned bad.

I found it the pack – it was tan and pushed against the seat back, so it was easy to get to.  I hated abandoning the cool socket set and other tools in the trunk, but since they were heavy and I had no way to pull them?  I’d leave them for whoever found them.  I put the bike repair kit, tubes, and pump into the bike bag.

I clipped the backpack from the hotel room to the kit bag, swapped my socks for the brand new wool socks from Wal-Mart, put on the knit hat, scarf and gloves, and started pedaling.

In February, the wind blew mainly from the north.  I was heading south.  I got on my bike, and turned south, skipping the Interstate as I headed through town.  Fifteen minutes later I had cleared the edges of the town, and was headed through open farmland as the Sun began to rise.  I was on my way.

### (for now)

TEOTWAWKI is short for “The End Of The World As We Know It.”  Sure, it’s a song from R.E.M., but it’s also shorthand for groups and individuals for the sudden collapse scenario where the world changes in an instant.  Many of the old rules, if not all of them, disappear very quickly.  And, if we didn’t have electricity, we’d never have to listen to R.E.M. again.  So, it’s got that going for it.

This version of TEOTWAWKI is set quite deliberately in wintertime, at the start of a blizzard on the East Coast.

Why?

Boston-Washington

Photo via wikimedia, CC3.0 By SA, Bill Rankin

20% (roughly) of the population lives there.  Government is seated there.  The financial and trading center of the United States is there.  If that region lost power in winter, in the middle of a blizzard?  At least 50% of the population would die that week, and I would expect the total casualties would be 90% or more within two weeks in that region.  The combination of the cold and chaos and the extreme population density would make most dystopian science fiction novels look positively cheery.  One thing that East Coasters don’t think much about is where the food they eat and the gasoline they use comes from.  Hint:  it’s not New York.

The average person has a couple of days of food in the house.  The average supermarket has three days of inventory.  Beyond that?  Factories, warehouses and logistics are required to keep a continual supply of food on the way to prevent starvation.  Our technically advanced and efficient civilization that allows us our apparent wealth, paradoxically makes us susceptible to nearly instant poverty.  The areas that are the least used to modern conveniences and least reliant on power will be the most resilient.

What about the cars, would they really not work?  That’s hard to say.  Although there has been some testing done (it is summarized in the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat of Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack) that would seem to indicate that many cars (80%??) might be unaffected, there is much that is still classified – and I don’t think the classified information says “not a problem.”  I will note that Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, the guy who led the EMP study in Congress now lives off the electric grid in a self-sustaining remote farm.

But, let’s say that 90% of the cars still work.  I chose the opposite for this story, but let’s say that 90% still work.  The cars would be good . . . exactly for as long as they had gasoline in them.  Without electricity, getting gasoline would be pretty difficult.  There’s a general consensus that most cars built before 1984 would work okay, as their electronics were minimal in comparison to today.  And computers and chips would be in trouble.  One declassified document I found in my research noted that computers were at the top of the list of devices that could be destroyed by an electromagnetic pulse.  And cars today are increasingly computer-dependent, but they’re also made of metal and don’t feature long conductors, so, that might help them be more resilient.

Why a bicycle?  Well, that’s the one thing that I could be pretty sure to find at 4AM in any town with a Wal-Mart.  And having cash is nice.  One time I tried to pay with credit card but mine had been cancelled (ID theft).  Having cash was very nice.  Carry some.

But with a bicycle you can cover a LOT of ground in a day – 100 to 150 miles for someone out of shape wouldn’t be out of the question.  If someone rode regularly?  They could easily do double that, especially with the wind at your back.  I did read one book called 77 Days in September – you can get it on Amazon – where the guy walked all the way home from Houston to Montana after an EMP.

I’m pretty sure by day three he would have figured out how to get a bicycle.  You could bike his route in 12 days or so, but I guess that would have killed the snappy title.  It’s not a bad book, but, you know, bikes won’t be hurt by an EMP.  Even many motorcycles might make it through fine, or be made to work with minimal retrofitting.  Maybe that was the point Mad Max was making?

The final point for today’s post:  There is a huge advantage in moving quickly when the rules change.  On multiple occasions in my life I’ve managed to get motel rooms, rental cars, or out of a really bad situation because I realized that things were off the rails and, rather than rage about it, act before the herd did.

In emergencies, being right 15 minutes before everyone else is an amazing advantage, which is why preppers prep.

Looks like this series will take up another Monday or two, at least until our hero can get home.

But what will he find along the way?  What will he find when he gets there?

Early Retirement: Things to Consider (cough Health Care cough)

“But they make wonderful patients:  they have excellent health insurance and they never get better.” – Frasier

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Fairbanks Memorial – they didn’t charge extra for ice.

Although I’ve discussed Early Retirement before here (Frugality, Financial Samurai, Mr. Money Mustache, and Early Retirement Extreme) I thought that it would be good to revisit the topic, primarily because I have a spreadsheet.

What kind of spreadsheet?  A crystal ball spreadsheet, one that predicts the future, all the way until 2081 when the ice sheets have melted and the dinosaurs have returned.  I’ve maintained this spreadsheet since 2014 or so, and it’s been very accurate for predicting my net worth over the course of four years.  I used it to decide (once upon a time) whether or not to quit one job and move to another.  Spoiler:  I didn’t move jobs.

The real reason I didn’t change jobs was fairly simple:  the spreadsheet told me that within three years I would have enough money that if I decided to chuck it all and get a job as say, a school teacher for a few years, I could continue to live the dissolute lifestyle awash in PEZ®, long essays, and regret to which I had become accustomed with no changes.  But there is a faction that sees a more radical idea:  just retire early.  They even have an acronym for it:  FIRE – Financially Independent, Retiring Early.

One of the biggest advocates of that is still Mr. Money Mustache.  MMM as he is affectionately known to his “Mustachians” retired several years ago, and has been blogging about it since.  His blog is exceptionally popular (LINK).  One secret of MMM is that he, by choice, has created a lifestyle of voluntary low-spending, i.e., he’s cheap.  By cheap?  His family has only one car, which they rarely use.  Mainly he uses a bicycle to go where he needs to go.

This is a fascinating idea.  You gain financial independence not by having the biggest pile of cash, but by having the smallest pile of needs.

For example:

I have a stack of books that is literally over 12 feet (143 meters) tall of books that I’m planning to read.  They’re stacked up by my bedside.  They’re stacked up on a bookcase near the bathroom.  They’re stacked up on my dresser.  And I get several new ones every month to replace the ones I finish reading.  And this doesn’t account for my library, which houses a collection of thousands of titles on every subject from tanning a hide to hiding a tan.  When we moved from Alaska to Texas, the movers set a company record for number of boxes packed in one day AND amount of weight packed in one day.  Reason?  Books.

Mr. Money Mustache would (probably) say:  “Why are you spending money on books?  There’s a library not two miles from your house that has a decent collection, and if they don’t have the book you want they can get it through interlibrary loan.  You could even get your fat butt on your bike and go down there to get a book and lose some weight in the process.”

He’s just that kind of party-pooper, but that would also impact my love of gadgets and gizmos that, ultimately, aren’t worth the time and money that I spend on them . . . except the drone, which is really, really cool.  Everyone needs a drone, right?

But let’s look at the major categories of spending and consider them through the soup-stained Mustachian paradigm.  Each of these topics could be a blog post by itself (and some have) but we’ll skim them today:

Mortgage: 

Don’t have one.  You probably have more house than you need, which causes you to spend more on heating and cooling than you would need to if you had a house of human proportion.  Pay it off so you’re not paying interest to a bank and can keep the money yourself.  But you still have to pay taxes and I’d still suggest you have insurance on the place, since it protects you in several different ways, especially from certain lawsuits that could dig deeply into your cash.

Home Location: 

Why live in an area that causes you to have to spend a lot of money?  Why live in an area (if you’re still working) that causes you to drive lots of miles to a job, which eats up both money in commuting cost and your life in drive time?  I know!  Location!

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This was an awesome location.  Wonder why we sold it?  Oh, yeah, piles of money.

Cell Phones: 

Why have a big data “full everything” when you can have a phone that costs less than $40 a month that gives you some data as well as more talking than anyone actually does on a cell phone?  And the need for the newest iPhone©?  Probably not so much.

Satellite/Cable Television: 

We have satellite television, along with a DVR box that records television shows so we don’t have to spend time watching them.  But let’s look at television . . . do we need a subscription to DirecTV® and Netflix™?  The number of things that I watch on satellite is dwindling – Silicon Valley™, Game of Thrones©, Better Call Saul™, The Last Ship®, sure I watch those when they’re on.  But most of the year, they’re not on.  And I can get most things on Netflix™ or Amazon®.  Do I even need satellite or cable anymore?

Landline: 

When I was a kid and the phone rang, I’d jump off the couch, and run to the receiver to pick it up.  It was an event!  Now, in a day where communication follows you to every crevice of your life, when the phone rings, we rarely even pick it up unless the phone announces that it’s Grandma.  Wondering why we even have one . . . oh, yeah.  Grandma.  And the phone is free with the Internet.

Food: 

Food is big business.  And an even bigger scandal.  How much food do we buy that we end up never eating?  Since we have teenage boys in the house, the answer is “very little.”  It’s been my saying (for forever) that the most expensive food that you buy is food that you don’t eat.

The second-most expensive?  Restaurant food, especially fast food.  I can buy three pounds of delicious ribeye steak for about $30.  Dinner for our family at Taco Bell™ (remember that we have teenagers) costs about $40.  Full disclosure, I account for a chunk of that $40 myself, but steak is so much better than a Nachos Bell Grande®.  And I can buy six pounds of ribeye for $60.  And we can eat for several meals on that, versus one trip to a nice restaurant, which would cost about $120-$180, including tip.  I maintain that I can eat better food more cheaply if I prepare it at home myself.  And by myself, I mean (except for grilling) The Mrs.  And as for high-priced Internet meal kits?  Wal-Mart® is our meal kit.

Cars:  

Mr. Money Mustache suggests having one or zero of these.  And he has a huge financial point.  Cars depreciate, so they’re crappy investments.  Cars require taxes and licensing and insurance cost annually, so even if you own one, keeping it around so you can drive it costs you annually.  And my family has an “N+1” philosophy about cars, where “N” is the number of licensed drivers.  Why?  We drive used cars, and they need maintenance at a higher rate than brand-new cars.  So we have a spare.  If we were retired?  One car would probably be enough (assuming we didn’t have the teenage boys in the house).  And, yes, a car is required for the rural area that we live in – you really couldn’t bike your  ten year old kid to a wrestling tournament (in winter) that’s 100 miles away . . . so we’d need at least one car.

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I’m hoping this one is paid for.

Home Maintenance:

If you own a home, something will break.  At my house, that seems to happen weekly, and it’s more than me having my 19th nervous breakdown.  Some things get fixed when I get around to it, like when one Wilder child broke the bannister.  It sounds like I’m blaming the kid, but I’m really not – if the bannister had been put together correctly in the first place (or fixed better than I did when last I fixed it) then it wouldn’t have broken in the first place.  This bannister got broken, oh, six years ago.  It still swings loosely.  I’ve never even been close to being motivated enough to fix it.  But when the air conditioner pan rusted out and started leaking condensed water onto the bathroom carpet?  Yeah.  Fixed in 12 hours.

And I estimate that immediate repairs (not fixing the place up) that are required to make the place habitable are probably about 1% of the home value each year.  If you’re handy and can do it yourself?  So much the better.  When the hot tub “brain board” fried?  I consulted with a hot tub repair guy and swapped it out myself – saving about $200 in the process.  When the flame rollout sensor on the furnace went out in winter?

I paid to have that done, since the consequences of screwing that up involved mortality via explosion or asphyxiation if I screwed it up.  $25 part, $50 in labor, and fixed that afternoon.  My rule is:  if it doesn’t require real expertise and can’t kill anyone?  Sure, I’ll try that.  I’ve saved thousands by doing that – but I think (after putting two complete roofs on and fixing two others), I’m done roofing.  Enough roofing.

Medical Insurance:

Medical insurance is the biggest variable to deal with for anyone attempting to retire early.  I will say this gently:  the health care system in the United States is the most unholy mixture of the worst parts of socialism and near-monopoly capitalism on the planet Earth, and that’s the planet that has the Department of Motor Vehicles AND school cafeteria lunches.  How is it messed up?  On the socialist side:  A hospital is forced to treat anyone who shows up.  Anyone.  By definition, if you don’t have any money, all the hospital can do is send you bills and not take the money you don’t have.  So, your incentive?  To go to the emergency room whenever you get a sniffle, so everybody who has insurance can pay for you.

On the evil capitalist side?  Hospitals don’t have to let you know what they’re billing you, or why.  Your ability to even remotely influence your bill is nearly zero.  From Karl Denninger’s post on how to fix healthcare – emphasis in original (LINK):  “. . .  the practice of charging someone $100,000 for scorpion antivenom in Arizona when the same drug from the same company is $200 for the same quantity 40 miles to the south and across the Mexican border.”  Denninger’s post has a list of similar issues – and common sense solutions that we’ll never undertake.  Why?  Look at the stock prices of the drug companies and the insurance companies.  Who would want to mess that party up?

MMM discusses his vexation with insurance in a pretty good post here (LINK).  Since I’m working at a job and have crappy insurance from them, I’ve not scouted the market too much – but my last look at the market mirrors MMM’s.  But in addition to the horrible composition

But up until you are ready for Medicare (and until your spouse is, too, which is a consideration for me, having married a younger – but still legal in most states! – woman) you’ll have this risk.  Medical insurance costs are estimated to rise between 15% and 30% next year.  And 7% thereafter.  Said simply, medical costs can’t continue to increase at that rate.  And when something can’t continue?  It won’t.  The system will break.  Insurance companies will go bankrupt, as every body . . . walks away.  When people can’t pay for insurance, they won’t.

But if you’re retired, have insurance while you can until the system breaks.  After that?  The rules will change again.  This will happen even if you are working.

So what does it all mean?

Retiring early has risks, but, so does life.  One thing I’ve seen is we certainly don’t know what’s around the corner.  If you could retire early and found out later you had a terminal disease, wouldn’t it be great if you retired early?  No.  You’d still be dead.  Seriously.  Dead is dead.

Retire early only if you don’t find what you’re doing fun.  If you’re having a blast at work and it has meaning to you, keep doing it until you die.  Why retire from a dream job?

I mean, who else would watch Johnny Depp’s finances for him?  By the way, what’s the best way to clean the money after having a money bath?

Asking for a friend.

Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You

This is Part I, click here for Part II.

“Get her?  That was your plan, Ray?  Get her?” – Ghostbusters (1984)

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Texans have a plan for hurricanes – and they’re pretty sure they haven’t seen any little ole storm that can beat them.

This is part one of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo,  TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold, TEOTWAWKI Part VII: Laws of Survival, Mad Dogs, The Most Interesting Man in the World and TEOTWAWKI Part VIII: Barricades, Tough Decisions, and Tony Montana),  TEOTWAWKI Part IX: Home at Last, and the Battle of the Silo and TEOTWAWKI Part X: Gump, Wheat, and Chill: Now With 100% Less Netflix,and Last TEOTWAWKI – The Battle for Yona, Final Thoughts on EMP, How To Power Your Car With Smoke

I was at the hotel when it happened.  There wasn’t any noise, really.

It was night, in February.  Although a near-record blizzard was hitting the Northeast (it was called “SNOWPOCALYPSE II” in the New York Post), where I was in the Midwest was unusually warm – the night temperatures were forecast to be above 40F for the next week, not bad when the usual low for this time of year was 20F.

What woke me wasn’t a sound – it was, rather the opposite of a sound – a sudden silence.  The radio I had on in the hotel room (it helps me sleep) was off.  And I mean it was off – no power at all to the LED display.

The pale pinkish-yellow sodium vapor light from the parking lot poles was never really stopped by the blackout curtains of the hotel – it always crept around the corners and through the cracks.

It was gone, too.

The heater to the room was silent.

I looked at my wristwatch.  It had a button to illuminate the display.  I pressed it.

Nothing.

A blackout would explain losing the radio, losing the parking lot lights.  It wouldn’t explain the watch.

I picked up my cell phone, and pressed the button on the side to wake it up.

Nothing.

A blackout wouldn’t kill the batteries.

I wasn’t groggy anymore.  I guessed looking at the moon that it was about 4AM.  At this time of year, it would be about four hours before full sunrise.

I had been travelling for business and was a 252 miles from home.  I got dressed and opened up the window.  The interstate was dark – no lights.  The town that I was staying at – big enough for a Marriott™ because it was on the interstate – was dark.

It wouldn’t be long before dozens of people woke up.  And it wouldn’t be long until a few people came to the same conclusion that I had come to:  the electronics were gone – all of them.  Power wouldn’t be back on soon, if ever.

I had to get home before it started to get bad.  And that would be soon.  But how?  Well, the beginning of a plan was already starting to form in my head.

### (for now)

Honestly, I think that greatest probability collapse of America will come by degrees – more of an erosion than an earthquake.  I think of this slow collapse like Hemingway described how bankruptcy happens in The Sun Also Rises: “Two ways – gradually and then suddenly.”

“Gradually” is the world falling slowly into some sort of Blade Runner®-esque existence.  The decay is evident even now as “poop in the streets” has become a new normal in big cities, which occurs here in flyover country only during the Fourth of July parade as the horses (who are last in the parade for a reason) come through.  Then the streets are cleaned.  And then we don’t have poop in them.  I could keep going – lowered life expectancy, lowering IQ, but I’ll stop for now.

This post isn’t about gradually, this post is about “Suddenly.”

There exists, for the first time in history, the ability and civilizational structure to destroy civilization all at once.  Sure, we’ve had nuclear bombs since 1945 hanging over our heads, but we’ve upped the ante – we’ve created a civilization that is more prone to catastrophic failure than any in the past.  Gary North (you can find his free articles here LINK), a prominent warning voice about the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem wrote many articles in which he pointed out the vulnerabilities associated with modern society.  He called the three prerequisites for maintaining our current civilization the Iron Triangle.  North defined the three legs of the triangle as electricity, telecommunications, and power:

Electricity

Electricity is first because it’s the most important.  Lose it?  It’s over.

Without electricity modern society is impossible.  From traffic lights to grocery stores, everything would just . . . stop.  No refrigeration.  No gasoline.  No air conditioning.  No cash registers.  No cell recharging.  No blinking inflatable Snoopy® in your yard at Christmas.

And as we saw in Japan after the earthquake, a nuclear power station needs power constantly to keep the nuclear-radiation stuff on the inside, and not on the outside.  And I’ve heard rumors that even starting a power generating station requires . . . power.  Hopefully the wind is blowing the electric windmills that day we lose power.

There are numerous countries on the planet that could lose power for weeks or months at a time with little to no change in lifestyle – these countries lose power for days at a time now, and have learned to cope.  Most developed countries would see anarchy within three days if the system went down.  In Chicago?  Even power isn’t enough to stop anarchy now.

But one requirement is that this power outage is not just a local phenomenon – if Switzerland lost power, well, who would notice?  But if people decided that they wanted the Swiss chocolates and the Swiss army knives and the Swiss hot cocoa, well, they’d pitch in and help Switzerland.  There exists a reserve capacity outside of Switzerland that’s big enough and well supplied enough that they could help the Swiss.

Likewise, when a hurricane hits Texas, well, I guess that’s a bad example because the Texans don’t need any of our damn help.

Loss of power to the entire continental United States?  Who could help us?  Most resources that could help would be an ocean away, assuming that they’re unaffected.  The happy projection if electricity was lost in the United States?  Half the population dead in a year.  The less-than-rosy projection (from a United States Congressional study) has 90% of the US population gone in a year.  And not “moved to Cleveland” gone.

What could possibly take the power down all over the United States?  Really, there’s just one candidate: an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

What is an EMP?  It’s like the Sun was rubbing its feet on the carpet, and then put its finger near you and gave you such a shock.  Except instead of a shock, it shoots charged particles at the Earth making pretty auroras.  And charges up the electrical infrastructure so much that the tiny electrical circuits in your smart watch, or car, or computer, or electrical power plant short out and become as useful as Play-Doh® after you left the lid off for three days.

Has this happened before?  Certainly.  The solar storm of 1859 was significant enough that it charged up the atmosphere enough that communication via telegraph wasn’t possible for a few hours – some telegraph operators reported being shocked by their telegraph lines.

Not a big deal, right?  No, not in 1859.  But a much smaller solar flare in 1989 took out all of the power in Quebec (part of America’s hat, Canada).  And if a solar flare similar in size to the 1859 flare happened today, it’s estimated that it would cost at least $2 trillion dollars (more than Johnny Depp spends on wine in an average month) to fix the damage in the United States alone.  Oh, and if you’re on satellite television, well, those would be gone due to the solar flare, too.

Another way to get a similar amount of damage is to explode a nuclear bomb above the United States.  This bomb wouldn’t cause any explosive damage – it would unleash x-rays, but rather than just bathing in the healthful x-ray light, the x-rays would smash into atoms in the atmosphere and cause a cascade of electrical energy.

You and I might not even notice this cascading energy, but, again, the tiny circuits in your local power plant (depending upon the size of the pulse) might be fried.

Oops.

No power.

Telecommunications

Every transaction you do depends upon some form of communication – often via satellite, but also through the internet.  In a small example of how this communication is important, I witnessed a series of gasoline pumps going offline.  Across the nation.  These gas pumps were primarily located at small Mom and Pop convenience stores.  The stores were open, but if you showed up at the pump?  The pump just didn’t work.  The reason was fairly simple – the home base in the transaction, the company that provided the interface between the fuel pump and the payment systems, had gone bankrupt.  Shut the doors down.  The gas was there.  The credit card company was there.  The electricity was there.  But the last leg of the transaction – the communication link to bring it all together, pay the taxes, and order more gasoline – had ceased to exist.

And it’s not just convenience store fuel transactions.

The inventory management of stores like Wal-Mart® is highly efficient, as in it is highly mechanized.  If Wal-Mart® lost their ability to computer-manage their inventory?  They’d have no way to figure out how to move products to their warehouse, let alone deliver them to a Wal-Mart™.

In a real-life example, Maersk® shipping, which accounts for about 20% of the volume of containers shipped worldwide, had their computer system infiltrated.  Essentially their entire shipping information system became encrypted on their servers.  This resulted in them losing over $300,000,000 in a ten day period, as chaos occurred at computer-managed dock after computer-managed dock.  They were saved because a backup of the system wasn’t updated since the Internet was down in Africa when they normally synced the systems.  Folks from Europe flew down to Africa, took the computer back to Europe, and used its information as the seed to reboot 4,000 servers and 45,000 PCs in a 10 day period.

Costly?  Sure.  But this was likely just collateral fallout of stuff going on between Ukraine and Russia.  This points out that the systems that we have created for inventory management and logistics required to run civilization have the potential to fail.  Something actually targeted at telecommunications for these systems . . . could have been devastating.

What would it cost to lose the Internet for a day?

What if it went down for a year?

Banking

When I was a kid, it was still possible to go to a store while the register was broken and get a clerk to do the math on what was owed and take your check or cash.  Now?  I’m not sure that most retail employees are up to the math (who even does math anymore?) let alone trying to figure out how to do a transaction without the Internet.  And who, besides me, even carries cash anymore?

Banking is a system that exists only so long as we believe in it.  Banks are allowed (by law) to lend out all of the money in the bank except for 11% or so.  Thus they have a “fractional” reserve of cash, and they’re a fractional reserve bank.

If you have $100 that you put in the bank, chances are very good that they loaned out all but $11 of your money.  The other $89 is out earning them interest.  If you want your money, you can go back and get it, since the bank has the $11 from everybody else.  If everybody wants their money back at the same time?  Problem!  In actuality people will get paid, because each bank lends a bit of money to the Federal Reserve bank that they can draw on in emergencies such as a bank run.  That’s really the big idea behind the Fed, to stop a systematic failure of all of the banks like happened in the 1930’s during the Great Depression.

But in 2008-09, it nearly happened again.  Banking systems were shutting down.  The Federal Reserve and the Treasury pumped the system so full of cash to prevent a complete shutdown of the financial system as we know it.  Did it work?  Sure.  But Interest rates are at near record lows a decade after this intervention.

Are there other risks to the banking system?  Certainly.  And if it doesn’t work?  The bright side (such that it is) is a dictator could and would seize control and force the system to work for a while without banking, but the loss would be our freedom and the civilization that we now know, along with millions dead from the sudden inefficiencies in the system.

Why?

Why have we put ourselves at risk to the Iron Triangle?  Because the efficiency that it brings has made society freer and wealthier that it could be without the Iron Triangle.  The Iron Triangle squeezes efficiency out of the system, but an efficient system is a fragile one; one prone to failure.  If you think of all of the systems that you have double of (like lungs) it’s not a bad design, it’s that having a spare lung or kidney increases your chances of living longer.  Or, failing that, you could trade your kidney to your bank to pay off your loan . . .

So, next Monday I’ll pick up where we were back at the Hotel.

I really do have a plan.

Health and Journalism . . . But You Already Know the Answers

“Listen to what I’m telling you. You go find a doctor. Get me Dr. Kildare. Get me Dr. Livingston. Get me Dr. Frankenstein. Just get me a doctor! Go where the – go where the doctors hang out.” – The Cannonball Run

burt

Eastbound and down . . . .

This week there were some amazing health care headlines:

  • Four Year Old Nearly Dies After Trying On Shoes Without Socks
  • Kratom Tea Left Teen with Brain Damage
  • Fran Drescher talks about Cannabis
  • Vanilla Ice Trapped on Quarantine Plane
  • New Miracle Cigar and Brandy Diet Found in Winston Churchill’s Notes

Sadly, I only made up one of those headlines.  I’ll leave it to you to guess which one.

But that’s the problem with health news nowadays:  much of it (if not all) is either poorly understood by the journalist, completely useless to the average reader, only news because a celebrity says it, or versions “cat chases dog” – stories of medical occurrences so rare that winning the lottery is more likely than your kid putting a shoe on without a sock and getting sepsis.  Humanity, for most of its existence, didn’t even have crude footwear like Roman sandals, but rather had to make due with inferior shoes like Nikes®.

Most popular news on health could be put in People© magazine or a comic book (but I repeat myself) and it would carry the same sort of impact.  I could even sit and conjure headlines that you’ll be seeing in the next year with what they won’t tell you in parenthesis:

  • Cancer Cure Shows Great Promise (In Curing Rats)
  • New Diet Pill Reduces Weight by 30% (But Will Turn Your Heart Into Jell-O® Pudding)
  • Sleeping Important For Health (Buy Your Boss Still Gets Mad When You Do It At Your Desk)
  • Eggs Now Good For You (Because Cholesterol in Eggs Isn’t What’s in Your Veins)
  • Mother Upset Because Child Got Really Sick Because of Illness Caught on a Beach (That 10,000,000 Other Kids Didn’t Get)
  • Some Game of Thrones® Actress Lost 50 Pounds (Due to Bulimia)

I know that health journalists like these kinds of stories because they have to write 16 stories a week or they’ll be replaced by JOURNOTRON 2000™.  JOURNOTRON 2000™ only consumes half the coffee that the journalist does, and only asks for increased wages once every year, rather than whine about it weekly.  And, what says “Pulitzer Prize©” like being the guy who figures out that Vanilla Ice was stuck on a quarantined plane with a bunch of virus-laden foreigners?  That’s hard-hitting health news that people NEED to see.

But why do people like to read the stories of how new Princess Whatsername® has had warts burned off her forehead since getting married to Prince Gingerhair?  Or how that maybe if they only ate skinless Pacific salmon that they could lose weight and have fewer forehead warts?

Health is funny.  People like to hide from their health.  Heck, people like to hide from the truth.

The truth about health is stunningly simple.

  1. Get exercise. Lift weights.
  2. Don’t eat too much, especially sugar. ESPECIALLY high fructose corn syrup.
  3. Butter is awesome.
  4. Don’t drink too much. Just enough to be happy, not enough so that drinking makes you miserable.   “A pleasure too often becomes a punishment.”
  5. If you weigh too much, eat less.
  6. You probably shouldn’t smoke cigarettes. Cigars are much better for you.
  7. Get enough sleep so you feel happy when the alarm goes off.
  8. Have a job that’s good enough so you feel happy when the alarm goes off.
  9. Deal with your family in such a way that you feel happy when the alarm goes off.
  10. Have a goal so you want to get out of bed when the alarm goes off.
  11. Be significant. In some way.  Build on that.
  12. Be important to someone. Build on that.
  13. Belong somewhere. Build on that.
  14. Don’t spend so that finances are a stress on your life.
  15. Remember to buy yourself something stupid that makes you happy once in a while. (Not too often.)
  16. Build a small, elite fighting training center in Southeast Asia and create about 1000 henchmen. Brainwash them into undying loyalty – I mean these guys should jump in front of a bullet to save your life.  You’ll need them when you take over Bangladesh.  Not that I could figure out why you’d want to take over Bangladesh . . .
  17. Set your expectations low so that what you expect doesn’t make you mad and disappointed every day.
  18. Set your expectations high so that you can achieve more than you ever thought you could.
  19. Understand that the last two points disagree. Deal with it.  You have to get by that or you can’t do anything.
  20. Vitamins are good, probably. If you have money and can buy them, research them and buy a few.  If you can’t, buy cheap ones like vitamin C.  It can’t hurt you and might help.   I’ll probably do another vitamin post in the near future.
  21. Almost anything can be a weapon. If you’re in an unexpected fight, fight for your life.  Be aware of your situation.  Practice something that gives you an edge in self-defense.  Practice it regularly.
  22. Don’t get strung out about the normal risks of life. There are 13,000 or so middle schools (grades 6, 7, and 8) in the United States.  So, there are about 60,000 total coaches.  30,000 of them lost this week.  They deal with that.  You should, too.  You won’t win every game.  Some of your risks won’t pay out.
  23. You can choose to be a victim or not. Make a decision.  Choice is yours.  But if you leave yourself in a position to be a victim?  Remember, you chose it.

But, strangely, these twenty-three points don’t make headlines.  Why?  I didn’t have to tell them to you.  You knew them already.

So do them.

Or don’t.  But don’t tell me you don’t know them.  You know, every morning, if you’re doing them or not.

Does anyone have a good contact in Southeast Asia for a henchmen training service?

Asking for a friend.