The end of the world as we know it

I thought that with all the accidental traffic to my blog, I should write something important (like the 300th post message to home-wrecking sluts wasn't important enough). So, I've decided to say a bit about a book I recently read about surviving disasters.

Sadly, though I just read the book a month ago, I've already forgotten the name of it.

But, that doesn't matter much, and maybe I'll remember it and add it in later. It was a very general overlook, and if you are worried about a particular kind of disaster, you should get another book (or many books) specifically for that. Cause if you have a plan for surviving a world of mostly blind people that has been overtaken by man-eating triffids, that probably won't be as helpful in surviving nuclear bombs or anything else involving radiation. More than half of this book was about storing emergency food in case something happens, probably something that involves the electricity being cut off.

There was a lot of stuff, even for a very general book. The author made a couple of points that I thought I'd mention. One of them was about having a portable kit with stuff to survive for three days. Most of the book talked about nutrition and calories and make sure you have enough of this and enough of that, etc.... But, for the three day emergency pack, most of that goes out the window (except for obvious things like pack plenty of bottled water). Unless you have an allergy or diabetes or some other medical condition that requires you to eat special food every single day, don't worry about too much sugar and not enough veggies and such. Pack something that you like that you will eat for three days, stuff that needs no refrigeration, stuff that needs no preparation, and maybe stuff that requires little preparation but no electricity (and make sure that you pack whatever is needed for food preparation and maybe some paper plates and plastic sporks.)

In other words, pack peanut M&Ms.

Okay, maybe not just that. Pack energy bars and granola and raisins. Pack cans of tuna and a can opener. Pack a jar of peanut butter. Pack crackers to put the peanut butter on, and maybe some store bought cookies. (Crackers and store bought cookies will go stale, so every couple of months you'll have to eat those and buy new ones to pack.) Pack banana chips and other hydrogenated snacks that you've been told are bad for you. Pack nuts, even if they have salt on them. Maybe pack some canned pineapple (just remember that it isn't as important as important as the canned tuna, so if you haven't got room for both, stick with the tuna). And if you think you can get hot water (remember that you probably won't have electricity), maybe pack a bowl and spoon and some of that instant oatmeal with too much sugar and ramen noodles with too much fat and salt.

With the stuff that's been in the news lately, I wonder if packing for a whole week might be better. Except that I'd never be able to carry a week's supply of water on my back, so I don't guess that I'd be doing that.

The other really good point made by the author was that you probably don't want to buy someone else's prepackaged emergency food. You would probably pay too much for it and/or not like the food. It might be low quality stuff that couldn't be sold for profit at places that you would normally buy food, but after it's been repackaged for "emergency supplies" not only do people buy it, but now they pay extra for it. And the calorie count is probably lower than what you would need in an emergency, so you'd probably have spent all this money and then still not have enough food. So then there's all these tables and charts (most of which I did not read, cause I'm not going to go out tomorrow and buy all of this stuff) suggesting that you might need this much of something and that much of something else, and how to store it, and canned is probably better than dehydrated if you have the space, though you probably want to try a bit of both.

There was a whole chapter about frozen food. I'm not sure why. In most disasters we'd be preparing for, there would be no electricity, the freezer would stop working, and then you'd probably be stuck with a lot of food that would thaw out and then go bad. Have you even seen this type of disaster movie with the electricity and everything still working?

Night of the Comet. Maybe? Flip a few switches at the mall, and the lights came on, music played, and the escalators worked. Maybe a week later, the traffic lights still worked. This never made any sense to me. I'm assuming that when whatever it is comes that without the guys going to work at the power plant the electricity will soon go off, and there will be no traffic lights, no music at the mall, and no working freezers.

Okay, there might be a few working freezers. There might be some rich "green" people who have totally switched to solar and wind power, and they will have working freezers. And there will be a few people who bought gas powered generators for Y2K who will have working freezers and other things until they run out of gas. But for most of us, our freezers probably aren't going to work. Little is said about this in the book, just if you have a bunch of frozen stuff and the power goes off, you'd better have a plan to store the food some other way, like drying and canning. I'm not sure how to can a frozen steak, so I'm probably better off just buying Spam and canned tuna to begin with.

Anyway, you're supposed to store enough food for about two years, and then not everything you want to store will last for two years, so you'll have to store a lot of different things. And then before the two years are up and you're out of food, you'll have to do stuff like learn to plant corn. And so you'll also have to store three years worth of garden seed, cause you're first attempt at gardening might not be what you hoped for, and the second year there might be a drought and/or a late frost, and so forth. You'll always need to store several years worth of extra seed, just in case of one year's crop failure.

I read this book and thought it was all a good idea, though even with all of that it would only work for certain disasters. A few months ago, I read One Second After, about trying to survive following an EM pulse, and I think that it would really help for that (and maybe the world taken over by triffids), but I don't think it would help much in a nuclear attack (unless I knew ahead of time where the attack would be and moved all of my supplies someplace safe). I think that I'm too far inland to worry about tsunamis, but if I were hit by one I guess that my supplies would get all wet and ruined, or at least scattered and/or buried under debris. Also, if terrorists poison the air, I'm not sure what I'd be able to do about that, unless again I knew ahead of time and were able to leave the area being attacked, or maybe do some short-term thing involving gas masks and/or oxygen tanks. And if there's an outbreak of smallpox, I'm unlikely to be in the minority who survive.

Two years supply of food and three years supply of garden seed won't help me survive either poison or plague. In the unlikely event that I survive either of these things while the majority of other people die, I won't need to worry about my own emergency supplies, cause I'll just take stuff that used to belong to the dead people. So again I'm back to thinking that this plan is mainly good for surviving after an EM pulse (or maybe survive hiding in the basement from people infected with Rage, except that I don't have a basement to hide in anyway).

So after reading this book, I'm thinking that I need that three day emergency supply pack for short-term emergencies, and that if I want to prepare for a long-term emergency, I'd better decide which emergency to prepare for, probably the EM pulse.

Only just before I started writing this, I made an attempt to find the name of the book I just read last month, and I came across a website that reminded me of the other emergency I should be planning for.

The Tribulation is coming.

Not that I'd really forgotten about it, just that I wasn't specifically thinking too much about it when I was reading through this book decided what might be useful. So that might be similar to the plan for surviving the EM pulse, except that I'd need seven years of supplies in someplace so remote that I'd never see any other people. So I guess if I win the lottery I'll be buying a bunch of "green" stuff and moving to an underground bunker in someplace like Montana.

I think I'll buy a Spam cookbook.

Ramen noodles and the One Dollar Diet Project

Lately I have found myself clicking on some of the news headlines that I have to look at before I can read my emails and such. One headline was something about a sixteen cent meal. I clicked on it, thinking that it was going to be some sort of beans and rice recipe. It wasn't. It was an article about ramen noodles.

I'd forgotten about ramen noodles. I used to eat them all the time, but not so much recently. So I went out and bought a bunch of them and have enjoyed eating them. Not quite tired of them yet, but I probably would be if I had to live on them all the time.

So a few days ago I clicked on some other headline about saving money on food, and it led me to the One Dollar Diet Project blog, about a couple who tried to eat on one dollar a day for the month of September.

In the past I have tried to keep my meals down to a dollar each, but not three meals a day for a dollar. And then the dollar a meal didn't include milk or sodas or orange juice, or even the occasional dessert or popcorn or veggie snacks between meals.

A dollar a day? Can it be done?

Okay, this was more what I was thinking, with a lot of beans and rice.

The couple doing the experiment said they were vegan, so there were no eggs, and no milk and no cheese and no mention of what might be done with ten pounds of chicken leg quarters. Still, there were a lot of things that they didn't do that surprised me.

First thing was that they were trying to avoid eating ramen noodles. This is the main thing that some of us eat when we don't have any money. They bought six packages just in case, and only ended up using one or two of them. I don't remember them eating any humus. And there was no mention of bean sprouts. Really, those two are healthy and really really cheap if you make it yourself, and they didn't even mention either one. And they didn't figure out to try making soup until they were already twenty days into the experiment. And there was no mention of TVP either.

They did a couple of odd things, but it's their experiment, and they can do odd things if they want to. One thing was their rule that they didn't take free food that other people couldn't have. I would think that this rule was to prevent people from offering to have them over for dinner several nights a week during the experiment. But at least twice they turned down food that people really trying to save money would not have. In fact, this part of the experiment was on the wasteful side. They skipped a lunch that was bought buy their employers for everyone at work. I think that they should have gone to lunch with everyone else and just made a note of it that they didn't have to buy lunch that day and maybe try to spend a third or fourth less that day. But they skipped lunch, which meant that either someone else ate their share and gained weight, or their share was just thrown out. And they went someplace like a convention or a lecture, and they were offered free food but didn't eat any. Some of it they wouldn't have eaten anyway, cause it had bacon or some non-vegan thing, but again it seemed a waste to me to turn down food that was bought for you and probably ended up being thrown away.

I'm glad that they didn't crash parties or pretend to be college students and get free lasagna from the BSU or pretend to be interested in the Astronomy Club to get free pizza or donuts. But turning down free food seems silly, especially since they don't really object to free food, just free food that isn't available to everyone.

Then there was comments left on what they did consider free for the taking. While they turned down meals that were actually bought for them, they ate free samples at the grocery store, knowing that they had no intention of buying the items being sampled.

And then there was the stealing from McDonald's. Not that they stole Big Macs or anything, but they did go in and get ketchup and pancake syrup. Most of the people leaving comments thought that this was clearly stealing, since they were not customers. I'm not quite sure it is stealing, but it isn't the right thing to do either. If they had kept left over pancake syrup from an earlier trip, that would be good, because packets left on the table are probably thrown out anyway. And maybe some of us even ask for more than we plan to use that day, knowing that we can take home the extra and not have to buy that bottle of ketchup that we rarely use at home anyway. But I would never just go into a restaurant and ask to be given something if I wasn't a paying customer that day.

I think I would have liked it better if they got this "free" ketchup and mustard from gas stations. At least they were customers buying gas even if they did not buy the food that the mustard and ketchup were provided for.

I have not yet read all of the comments, but I have read some dumb ones. Some people just did not believe that a tablespoon of peanut butter only cost a nickel, or that beans or rice only cost a dime, etc.... Later they went and listed all that they bought for the experiment, and showed that if you buy a large quantity of rice that it only costs so much a cup, or if you buy the large four pound jar of peanut butter that it only costs a nickel per tablespoon, etc.... The main thing is that you make everything that you can from scratch, and that if you buy in bulk you get a discount. So this one comment made the valid point that poor people would not always have available cash to buy in bulk, or the membership to the discount club, etc...so if they had bought small packages of stuff at Safeway the daily cost would be more. Some of that is true. But then the commenter totally misses the point and produces a shopping list of what a poor person would buy at Safeway, with the ten envelopes of flavored oatmeal for two dollars and the four packages of microwave popcorn for a dollar and two cans of beans would cost a dollar, etc.... So the commenter missed the whole point, because I'm sure at Safeway one can buy plain oatmeal for a dollar a pound and also pound bags of beans and popcorn for a dollar.

I'm debating about doing a similar experiment myself, only I probably wouldn't do a whole month. Two weeks is more my speed. And I'll be eating ramen noodles if I want. And if someone buys me a free lunch, I'm going to eat it.

Monday Morons--I don't want to be warned that I'm going to be hurt

My mom's church did the whole Judgment House thing last year. It isn't quite the same as hell house. Not that I've even been to a hell house, but I've seen a lot of stuff about it on TV, and they have scary scenes of mostly real life stuff, about drug addiction and abortion clinics and terrorist attacks and school shootings. Some of the hell houses have a lot of blood and gore, so that they look a lot like more traditional haunted houses. Judgment House is more of a play, with the scary "this could happen to you" type message.

So last year was their first year, and they did Collision, and I watched it and they did a very good job. This story follows three teenagers who die in a car crash, and then at the end we see who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. The scene of hell turned out to be really excellent, and not quite what I expected. The rest of the scenes were really impressive too. I wonder how much they spent on the sets and how they got some of the props. In the actual car crash scene there are two crashed cars, and I imagine that crashed cars are plentiful and you could easily borrow a few. And then there were police cars, and I suppose if you had to that you could make a fake police car by putting decals and lights on a regular car. But they also had an ambulance, and for the ambulance you pretty much have to have a real ambulance, so I'm wondering how they got one.

So I checked to see if they were going to do it again, and this years story is called 59 Minutes. I imagine that all of the stories follow a few characters to see how they end up, and that the last two scenes are hell and heaven, but I don't know that for sure. So I tried to follow the link to YouTube to watch a trailer of 59 Minutes. That didn't work as well as I'd hoped, but YouTube has other videos about Judgment House, and I watched a few of them and looked at a couple of hell scenes. I'm sure that the actual hell scenes were good to watch in person, but the video quality of most of them wasn't so good.

Anyway, there comments after one of the hell scene videos, and most of the people leaving comments were not very nice. And they wanted to know if Christians really believed this stuff and said how it wasn't very nice to try to scare people like that. And one person left a comment that yes we do really believe this stuff and that since hell is a real thing we would try just about anything to warn other people about it.

The next comment was something like--rape is a real thing, but I wouldn't want someone to say follow me or you'll get raped.

And I thought that this was just the most stupid thing to say. If I was about to get raped, and someone came to warn me about it, I would just be so happy to follow this person away from the dangerous situation. The last thing that I would do would be complain that someone is trying to scare me.

And then I realized that there are millions of girls who do exactly that every weekend. They are constantly being warned not to go to parties with older boys, and not to meet up with guys that they've met on the Internet, and to stay in very public places when you do meet someone, and don't get in a car with someone you've just met, etc....

About 1 out of every 3 girls will eventually be raped, but some of us just seem to want to get it out of the way early. Like I don't know why any sane woman would go to a frat party. I don't know why so many woman accept drinks from strangers. And I don't know why any woman would go try to find someplace more private with a guy that she just met.

But I know that a lot of people do all this stuff, because I've seen it on TV. Not just fictional TV either. I've watched men on hidden camera encourage a guy who said that he was going to have sex with a certain woman, even if he had to drug her, and then they watched while he put something in her drink and after that walk away with this woman who obviously wasn't well. And I watched another guy give dozens of drinks to women that did not know him, and afterwards when he told them that he was doing a TV program to see how many women he could trick into taking a drink that might have been drugged. All but one of the women got mad at him and were embarrassed that they were going to be part of this TV show, instead of being glad that someone had warned them that they were doing something unsafe.

And on another show we watched the chemistry students going to a party and handing out something that would warn girls that there might be something in their soda or beer that wasn't soda or beer. And they also had some test to see if the pill that was supposed to be Ecstasy might be something else. It's bad enough to take Ecstasy, but you certainly don't want to be taking a pill that is something other than that. And while we watched, someone brought over a pill and the test proved that there was something in the pill other than Ecstasy. And while we watched, the girl decided that since she had already spent the money that she was going to take the pill anyway. How stupid is that? The test can't tell you what is in the pill, just that it isn't Ecstasy. It could a sugar pill and do nothing, or it could be a cold pill and make you sleepy for the rest of the party, or it could be a very serious addictive illegal drug, or it could even be rat poison. You just can't imagine that anyone would do something so stupid, but there she was, on camera, doing exactly that.

When I take over the world, everyone will be a single parent

This one was originally in another blog. A funny thing about that is that on the other blog the title was too long for the whole title to be listed on the previous blogs. So it said that When I take over the world, everyone will be a sin....

So, hopefully, when I take over the world, everyone will get the title right and not be a sin.

Another thing is that I happened to write it on what would have been my dad's 65th birthday.

But never mind. Read on. And I have included the two comments from the original post


(the following was originally posted in another blog on Febuary 9th)

I was going to start a new blog to talk about how I would fix things if I had a magic wand. But I have several blogs already, and I've hardly used this one at all. So I'll just make the when I take over the world stuff a section of this blog.

I wasn't sure which of the take over the world posts to start with. Recently I read someone else's blog, and she was talking about being a single mom. So I guess I'll start with that.

Every once in a while, I hear that someone has a plan to pay people to volunteer for a sterilization procedure. A mathematical formula would determine how much of a potential financial drain your future children would have on society. If you agreed to be sterilized instead of having these children, the government would pay you a percentage of the estimated tax money saved.

Sounds great to me. I don't want any kids anyway. If someone offered me a free and safe permanent method of birth-control, I'd probably take it. If someone offered pay me to do it...wow.

Of course, I like to think that my high I.Q. would prevent me from being paid much money. On the other hand, my low personal income would also be factored in, and the two would probably cancel each other out. But if I'm offered any amount of money before I'm too old to have children, I'm going to take it.

Not that it will ever happen. I like the idea, but everyone else seems to hate it. And I really don't get most of the arguments. Like a bunch of poor people will go and have the procedure, or a bunch of black people will go have the procedure. So what? What if a bunch of poor black people willingly go have a sterilization procedure done and get paid for it. A bunch of other poor black people won't go and have the procedure. That would forever put an end to the discussions about welfare moms cranking out babies to get more money. If some people were really doing that sort of thing, and you offered them something like this instead, wouldn't they take the easy money up front?

Several years ago I read a book, and I can't remember the name of the book, or even who wrote it. It was a woman, I remember that much, so I want to say it was by Anne McCaffrey or Vonda McIntyre, because that was who I was reading at the time. Anyway, in this book all the people were legally allowed custody of one child. Period. But they had sole custody. There were no custody fights and arguments about visitation or how someone thought their child's other parent wasn't raising the child right. You have custody of one child, and everyone else back off, including the child's other biological parent.

Wouldn't that just solve all kinds of problems? Custody of children is decided before they are even conceived. If a couple gets a divorce, there is no custody battle. If the custodial parent wants to pick up and move to Alaska, that's okay. There is no arguing about how much child support the non-custodial parent will have to pay, because there is no such thing as child support. If you can't afford to take care of a child yourself, don't have one. You and you alone are responsible for that one child.

Which is not to say that you couldn't have custody of one child and live with someone who has custody of another child. You could raise them together, share living expenses and all of that. For that matter, you could live with ten other people who have custody of ten other children, and raise them all together and share living expenses and all of that. But it would be very clear who had custody of a particular child, and who had the final word on all things concerning that child.

There were a lot of things in the book that would probably never work in America. In the book the custodial parent paid the other biological parent for creating the child. In general, women were paid more than men per child. On the other hand, in an individual's lifetime, a man could father many more children than a woman would be able to have. In the book, the main character's custodial parent was paid to be the biological father of over three hundred children, but he still owed money to the biological mother of the child he had custody of. Paying someone to have sex with you, even for the purpose of creating a child, is still prostitution. And it might seem too much like babies for sell. We don't buy and sell people anymore.

There are other things that did not happen in this book that I would also think about. If you have bad genes, besides paying someone of the opposite sex to help you create a child, couldn't you also hire someone of the same sex for the same purpose, so that the resulting child would not have your bad genes. And since I don't want any children anyway, could I sell my legal right to have custody of one child to someone who would like to raise more than one child?

A lot of things will be different after I take over the world.


2 comments:

a friend said...

Concerning high IQ vs low income: I don't think Einstein was ever rolling in the dough, and who really wants to see the Donald Trump or Paris Hilton genes propagated! In other words, the high IQ probably matters, but the level of personal income really might not matter much.

Concerning the author: Did you read Ursula Le Guin? She liked to deal with similar issues, as I recall. The only McCaffrey's I read were "light" and never got into such serious issues. I only read one McIntyre ("Star Trek II")

What was done in the book if a parent happened to be a very bad parent who should not have custody at all? Or did they ever go into such things?

"There were a lot of things in the book that would probably never work in America."

You'd have the opposition from Catholics and others who want larger and larger families.

"Paying someone to have sex with you, even for the purpose of creating a child, is still prostitution."

Actually, this is legal in many countries, and in a small part of the US. If you make insemination artificial, this gets rid of any of this concern if it is necessary to get rid of such a concern. Then it takes us one step toward "Logan's Run" by disconnecting sex with procreation.

Concerning bad genes: Yes, some people have very bad genes. The problem right now is that there are a lot of bad genes out there and there is probably no ability to identify them and screen everyone readily. This is changing, however. The advances in genetics, even in the past 6 or so years, are rather significant.

"And since I don't want any children anyway, could I sell my legal right to have custody of one child to someone who would like to raise more than one child?"

That would make sense as part of this. However, the same complainers would call this "exploitation".

"A lot of things will be different after I take over the world."

With or without the help of lab rats...



Laughingattheslut said...

The proper question is with or without lab mice, not lab rats.

And I guess it will have to be without, cause I'm sure he'd soon find a way to get rid of me.

No, the level of personal income matters, because the point was to lower the number of children of parents who can't financially take care of them. It's a math problem--spend X amount of money now to convince someone not to have children, or spend several times X amount on the children through welfare, food stamps, unpaid medical bills, etc....

McIntyre wants to cure everything with virus therapy. And I hear that her day job is scientist, so she might actually do it. Once she's cured everything, she'll move on to making people who can fly and people who can live underwater.

The book did not get into such things. The woman in the book had a very loving father, who was a bit upset that he still hadn't been able to meet his financial obligations to the biological mother.

I don't doubt it would be done artificially a lot of the time, but this was not the implication in the book. The man was well liked and had been paid to father over 300 children. It probably wasn't entirely for his high IQ. I did wonder about the phrasing of the contract. If a pregnancy doesn't happen right away, how long do the people have to keep having sex before one of them is allowed to disolve the contract, and is there a fine one of them pays to get out of the contract, etc....

There's always someone complaining about exploitation in this sort of thing, so I don't think it would happen anytime soon. I still think it's a cool idea.