Category Archives: Essays

In Context: World Grain Harvests

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One of the frustrations I have with just posting links is the lack of context that comes along with them. I tend to gravitate towards links talking about the bad news as because everyone has a strong tendency towards normalcy bias. Even those who are pessimists are generally in the grip of this cognitive bias. They talk as if they are expecting the worst to happen but they rarely act that way.

Having said that, I think one of the causes of normalcy bias is the fact that we tend to look at negative indicators devoid of context. Because we tend to look at negative indicators in isolation, we are not very good at figuring out when things are truly serious and when they are balanced out by positive factors that we don’t realize are connected. This trains us to disregard negative indicators without knowing why because so often they are balanced out by positive things we don’t see. Then when we are confronted by indicators of a true disaster, we disregard them even though in retrospect it should have been obvious that something bad was coming.

Part of this is an unavoidable result of our cognitive limitations. We simply can’t make all the connections that we need to make to truly understand things. But it would help if would occasionally take the time to try to look at things in context so that we can come to a better understanding of what is really bad news and what is just a wash because good news is not being reported.

In this particular case, we are going to focus on the current and projected harvests of the three major grains (wheat, corn, and rice) to try to put the good and bad news on that front into context. My primary source for the following discussion is the US Department of Agriculture August survey of world agriculture production.

Wheat

If your main source of news is links posted in the Ethereal Voice, you could be forgiven for thinking that the world is going to be experiencing a major wheat shortage. Most stories posted here that mention wheat are all about how bad the crop is in India, the EU issues with drought, and how war in Ukraine is going to lead to starvation. I think I might have done one link on how the harvest was looking good in Canada and I know I made mention that Russia was looking to have a really good harvest. But those stories are in the distinct minority. And that is why you might be surprised to find out that this “Marketing Year’s” worldwide wheat harvest is expected to be about the same as last year’s.

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Common Demographic Errors Committed During Debates On Gun Laws

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Debates about gun laws are largely a waste of time because everyone pretends they are about facts when really they are about values. Having said that, there are many common errors repeated by both sides on a gun debate that trigger my “somebody on internet is wrong reflex.” One of the most common set of errors relates to comparing differing countries or states without accounting for some basic demographic facts that mean the comparison that on the surface seems compelling is actually misleading or at least not as straight forward as it seems. Since this set of errors also impacts other less emotionally driven arguments, I will indulge myself and point out some of these common errors.

Error Number #1: Failure to account for age structures of the countries or states that are being compared.

Brazil has a murder rate of 20.9 people per 100,000. That is pretty high but it is still lower than 18 other countries such as Venezuela (36.7) or South Africa (33. 5). Compare to Brazil, the USA’s murder rate of 6.3 per 100,000 does not look so bad. But USA rate is worse than any European country except Russia at 7.3 (Ukraine’s murder rate was basically the same as the US before the war started). On the other hand, Switzerland and China (if you believe their statistics) come in at .5 per 100,000. That is so much lower then the US rate as to make them seem almost murder free by comparison. But if we focus on Switzerland and Brazil for a bit, we can see why a countries murder rate is impacted by a lot more then just guns.

Brazil has far tougher gun laws then the US but it has a far more murders then the US. Switzerland has some of the most liberal gun laws in the world (stricter then some parts of the US but you can own rifles in Switzerland that would be illegal in New York or California) and they have one of the lowest murder rates in the world.

If you read gun debates, you will see endless attempts to score points off of figures like this. Pro-gun people will bring up Switzerland so often you would think it was a utopia and anti-gun people will pound home the fact that US murder rates are far above any other “First World” country as proof that its gun laws are to blame.

In all that sound and fury, you will rarely see discussed the other factors besides guns that go into influencing the murder rate. One of the simplest of these factors is age. Young males under thirty commit the vast majority of violent crimes. So all things being equal, we should expect the country with younger population to have more crime. Brazil’s average age is 33.5. The US average age is 38.6 years. In Switzerland the average age is 43.1 years. In the EU as a whole, the average age is 43.9 years. Those average age differences might not seem like a lot, but when your average age is 33.5 you have a lot bigger part of your percentage of your population in the prime crime committing ages.

For example, 62% of Brazil population is 29 or under (and those is prime crime committing ages). By contrast, Switzerland only has about 30% of its population under 30 (I only found figures for Switzerland from 2014 and at that time they were 34% but the Swiss population on average has gotten older since then so I rounded down to 30%). So Brazil has more than twice the percentage of people in the prime crime committing demographic then Switzerland does even though Switzerland’s average age is only 10 years greater then Brazil’s. So even if all other things were equal, you would expect Brazil’s murder rate to be twice as high as Switzerland’s due to demographic reasons alone (for this statement to be even roughly true, the under 30 crowd has to be more then 10 times as likely to commit murder then the over 30 crowd. I believe this to be the case but can’t find a source that breaks it down nice and neat and I am too tired to do all the math to collate the various sources to check my figure).

Granted, Brazil has way more than twice the Swiss murder rate so obviously there is more going on in Brazil then just a younger population. But the point is that anyone (Pro or anti gun) that you see comparing crime rates between countries without accounting for the differing age structure between countries is making bogus use of statistics.

Error Number #2: Failure to account for economic inequality.

The age gap is only one of the things that you need to account for when considering crime statistics. Another thing you should look at is the level of economic inequality. All other things being equal, a country with higher levels of economic inequality has a much higher crime rate then countries are more equal.

The reason for this correlation can be debated endlessly and I will not get into that debate here. The only thing I will note is that countries with high inequality also tend to have high rates of single motherhood, drug use, and other social issues associated with crime. They also tend to be far more diverse and there is evidence that suggests that people are more willing to commit violent crime on people perceived to be part of the “other” group.

Regardless of the reasons, the fact remains that high inequality corresponds to higher crime so strongly that I am not aware of anyone (left, right, center) who doubts that the two things go together. The main problem is that measuring inequality precisely is a lot harder and more subject to dispute then talking about the age structure of a country. Comparing Switzerland to Brazil both shows how inequality tracks with crime and how those measure can be murky.

The most common way of measuring economic inequality is via the Gini index. A Gini index of 0 represents perfect equality, while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality. Using that measure, Brazil had a index of over 53 in 2019 and Switzerland had an index of just over 30 in the same year. So if you go by the index, Brazil is almost twice as unequal as Switzerland. Now you can question how accurate those figures are. For example, do those figures accurately capture the much larger grey/black economy in Brazil then in Switzerland? On the other hand, is the Swiss figure overstated (in the practical sense that matters to us) due to the large number of wealthy people who visit/keep a lot of money in Switzerland?

But regardless of such questions, everyone familiar with both countries would agree that Switzerland is a lot more equal then Brazil is. And for that reason, making arguments about gun laws by comparing Switzerland to Brazil without taking that inequality into account is silly. In the case of this particular example, the only one who would do it would be pro-gun people since Switzerland has vastly more permissive gun laws then Brazil does. But it is just as silly when the anti-gun people try to make comparisons between countries without taking this into account.

For example, in 2019, the US had a GINI index of 41.5. Japan had an GINI index of 29.9 and a much older population. But anti-gun groups will compare the two countries murder rates all the time without even attempting to take those two things into account. More commonly, the US is compared to Europe where the average EU Gini index was 30.2 (and also with a much older population then the US). The fact that nobody should expect Brazil to be like Switzerland regardless of what you think the ideal gun laws are is obvious to all the anti-gun types. But somehow they expect that US can become like the EU even though by all measures there is the same type of difference between US and EU (albeit not as extreme) as there is between Switzerland and Brazil.

The Bottom Line: The US is more like a Latin America country then it is a European one.

All the chattering classes of either side of any political debate in the US tend to start from the presumption that we naturally should be compared to European countries. I think that this is in larger part because most of the chattering class in this country is overwhelming white. But the country as a whole is not.

In fact, if you look at most demographic measures (Age structure, ethnic makeup, economic equality, crime rates, church attendance and other measures of religiosity, and so on and so forth) the US is more like Latin America then it is Europe. The only leg people have to stand on in terms of thinking that the US should be compared to Europe is in income per head. But there is no good evidence that income per head has anything to do with the murder rate regardless of gun laws. There are really poor countries that have a much lower murder rate then countries that are much wealthier countries. (Nepal being one example of a country with a relatively low murder rate compare to much wealthier countries).

Ironically, there is one way in which most Latin American countries are more like Europe then the US. And that is regards to gun laws. It is harder in most Latin American countries to legally own a gun than it is in many European countries like Finland or Switzerland to name just a couple. But that does not stop Latin America from being even worse on average then the US when it comes to the murder rate.

In my personal opinion, if the US had European style gun laws, we would have the same situation as most Latin American countries. In other words, we would still have high rates of murder but only the privileged and the criminals would have guns. But that is impossible to prove in this life and even if you could, it would not make any difference.

The blunt fact is that the gun debate will always ultimately boil down to values. In particular, how much you trust the government and how much you value personal freedom? If you pay attention, you will notice that in general, people’s opinions regarding what they are willing for the Government to do to protect them to from Covid also track what they are willing to have the government to do to protect them from guns. Just like with guns, people argue back and forth about the how “effective” various Covid measures are. But if you really dug down, the real difference is not around fact, but around what people value more, their safety or their freedom.

And that is not a trade off you are going to resolve with facts and figures.

Karp Lykov, Randy Weaver, And The Illusion Of The Third Choice

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In 1936 Karp Lykov fled with his wife and two children into the wilderness to escape the Communists. As is recounted in this news paper article about his only surviving daughter….

Her father had taken the decision to flee civilization in 1936 after a communist patrol arrived on the fields where he was working and shot dead his brother. Gathering a few meager possessions and some seeds, he took his wife, Akulina, their nine-year-old son, Savin, and two-year-old daughter Natalia, and headed off into the forest.

Over the years they retreated deeper into taiga, building a series of wooden cabins amid the pine trees. When their metal pots had disintegrated beyond use, they were forced to live on a staple diet of potato patties mixed with ground rye and hemp seeds. The Lykovs subsisted mainly on trapped wild animals and cultivated potatoes.

They had no firearms, no salt and did not know how to make bread.

Mr. Lykov was not prepared to live in the wilderness. As a poor deeply religious Old Believer Russian peasant he had more of the necessary skills than your average American. Even still, he was not ready for the challenge he took on regardless of whether you judge him by the standards of his time or the standards of a modern day “survivalist.” And yet, he and his wife managed to have two more children and he lived for more than forty years out in wilderness. At his death in 1988 he was well beyond the average life span for a Russian male (he died at around 86 years old of age if the dates in his Wikipedia article are correct).

All this did not come without cost. He lost his wife to starvation in the 1960s. All his children except one would die at a younger age then he did. It could be questioned whether he really gained anything by fleeing to the wilderness. But if you judge him purely by the metric of survival; he did pretty well for not being prepared and trying to live in one of the harshest climates in the world. And he lived free to practice his religion as he saw fit all the while that the communists ruled his land.

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Lessons Learned Snow Storm of 4/18/2022

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The snow storm of 4/18/2022 caused a lot of power outages in this area. Urban places that don’t normally lose power were without power for almost a week. My own area of responsibility was hit hard and it was not until 5 days after the storm that the last area I was responsible for went off generator power.

In the grand scheme of things, this was not a big deal. Most of the rest of the state was not impacted so resources poured in to fix things. The weather was not super cold. Needed resources could be found if you went a little out of your way. Nonetheless, I think there were lessons learned that while not critical for this emergency, it could make more of a difference if things had been more serious. My list of lessons learned is as follows….

1. Carry a flashlight: It is what I needed to go to the bathroom in the mostly office complex I was working in. We did not have lights in the bathrooms for almost a week (we were on emergency power) but the water all worked fine. Other people used their cell phones but I could not find a way to use a cell phone in a bathroom in way that I was comfortable with where as with a flashlight I could set it down on a counter or garbage can or like surface and it threw off enough ambient light for my needs.

2. Carry a power bank for phones: I was on my cell phone non-stop the first few working days after the storm without a lot of options for recharging it. I had to use my power bank to keep my phone going and one of my co-workers (He was not using the phone as much as me but I suspect his reason for needing a recharge had to do with using it as a flashlight all the time. That is why it is good to have a flashlight even if you are happy with the light that your cell phone throws off.). I have noticed that in Ukraine in the cites under attacked everyone is going stations set up by that countries emergency services to get drinking water, food, and to charge their phones. It is interesting that cell phones retain their utility even in warzones.

3. Carry a good light weight hand saw in the car: I had my Silky Saw with me when I went in the first day when all the trees where down. I did not need to use it because I was driving my off road capable truck and so just went into the drainage ditches a few times to get around trees. But if I had been driving my car, I would have needed the saw to take out the smaller branches on the tops of trees to create enough space for my car to get through. A hand saw will not be enough to get through big tree trunks but all the trees I saw down that day could have been passed by a car with AWD if you cut the smaller branches off the top.

4. Don’t freak out when your generator stops working: In my area of reasonability I had eight generators stop working on me at various points during the extended area of responsibility. Most of these were Generacs. Of all of them that went down, only two of them were what I would consider real issues (a leak in the coolant reservoir and low oil with metal shavings in the oil). All of the rest were a sensor issues. Most of the sensor issues were fixed simply by resetting the generator and they ran fine for all the rest of the power outage (one of the non-Generac generators kept going down periodically with a sensor failure but started right up again after every reset). Even the generator down on coolant was fixed without parts (the tank was rigged up in a way to keep it from leaking) and so was the one low on oil (put more oil in and it ran for the rest of the power outage). Bottom line is if has got fuel, oil, and coolant, give it another shot before you assume you are doomed.

5. Make sure you have emergency food that does not require heat or refrigeration in your car: There was no power for cooking or refrigeration at the worksite and the restaurants were not working the first day either. Mountain House granola has freeze dried milk in it. Add water and it is like bowel of cereal. Not a lot of calories but better than nothing on a stressful day.

6. Cell tower generators seem to be able to last on the upper range of what I believed to be possible: Long before this storm I took a survey of our local cell tower to see what kind of emergency backup they had. In my notes at the time I wrote about a particular carrier’s generator at that site “Tag on generator says it has 54 gallons of fuel on board. If this is true, it will put it right around the 48 hour mark.” Elsewhere I wrote “current estimate is the local towers will only last 24 to 48 hours.” These estimates were based on a combo of knowing the federal regs and looking up the fuel consumption rates of generators that I saw on the local tower. I am not sure exactly when the power came back on but they lasted more than 24 hours for sure. The local cell service did go down for a little while on the morning of the second day but that seemed to be an area wide thing. I wonder if they shut things down at what they perceived to be a low usage time to extend run times or if it was some other issue not related to lack of power that caused the mobile networks to go down?

7. Putting off stuff you know you will need in an emergency can come back to haunt you: I had two things on my list of things to do because I knew I would regret not doing them if an emergency came. One was get the generator working at my brother’s house. Another was get the software token working that allows me to work remotely. In spite of knowing about these issues for at least a couple of weeks before the storm, I did not have them taken care of by the time that storm came around. In the end it was not a big deal. We were able to get the generator running (another sensor issue) and since most of my work was on the phone the first couple of days I was able to operate without a token until I was able to get on my employers intranet and fix my token issue. Still, both of those things could have been a more serious issue if the emergency had been worse.

8. Getting a propane tank filled in a timely manner can be tough in even a mild emergency: We were in the red on our tank when we got a refill and it took some begging to accomplish that. As it turns out, the power came back on just before we got the refill so it was not all that critical in the end. Still, if we had run out I would have felt like a fool for not turning the propane powered generator off at night to extend our supply. My planning document for an ice storm had just that plan for when roads were blocked with down trees, but I figured once the roads were clear nothing would prevent the propane trucks from coming. That was more or less the case but it was a closer run thing then I would have liked. There was a backup plan for heat, water, and lighting but the cooking plan for a no propane situation was not well developed. Also, there was a lot of food in the freezers that would have gone bad if the issue had lasted long enough. This issue was not limited to my personal location. Generators at work took some government persuasion to be filled in a timely matter. Bottom line: You should not assume you are getting fuel just because the roads are clear even if it is not an end of the world type emergency.

9. Urban areas don’t always recover first: In my FEMA plan for Rural Folk I said that if urban areas were without power for two weeks, rural areas would be without power for a month. That statement seemed like a combination of common sense and extrapolation from historical events. But the biggest surprise I had during this storm is that many rural areas had their power restored before some of the urban areas did. Rumor had it is that this was in part due to difficulty getting transformers but it was also rumored that the local power company was having difficulty coordinating crews effectively. Regardless of the reason, it was a pleasant surprise to have power restored at home before either my main place of work or many of my more urban co-workers had their power restored. I guess the main lesson is don’t expect that you will be all right in short order when this stuff happens just because you live in an urban area.

And that is all I can think of that I can honestly say were lessons learned based on the this storm. Do any of you have anything to add?

Test Run With Silky Big Boy

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I have been wanting a saw to keep in the car in case the road was blocked with fallen trees and I really wanted to get home. The main thing that has been preventing me is the thought that you can’t get a saw big enough to do any good without having something too big for a car. But I heard a lot of good things about about Silky Saws so I decide to give them a try.

Shortly after my Silky “Big Boy” was delivered to my house a chance to try it out came in the form of a top of a pine tree falling across one of my mother’s trails. Normally I would have got out the chain saw for a task like this but it was cold and I did not feel like fighting with the saw to get it started.

When I started, the tree look like this….

Blocked Path

My original goal was to the do the bare minimum of cuts so that I could easily toss everything into the brush. But when I got to cutting I was so amazed at how easy it was that I started cutting it into smaller pieces just for the fun of it. It is certainly no chain saw, but I have no doubt it could handle lot bigger trees then what I was dealing with in this picture if I needed it to. The official instructions tell you it is only recommended up to 8″ but I have heard you can go a lot bigger then that in a pinch simply by cutting from two sides instead of only working one cut.

Bigger Cut

The total time it took me to cut everything up into the neat little pile below was 26 minutes (and I did time myself with the stopwatch function on my phone). A chain saw would have been a lot faster if I already had it out and running. But I am not it all sure it would have been faster to get a cold chain saw up and running just for a small job like this.

The End Result

From my perspective, the best part about all this is that it was done with a saw that is only 16″ long folded up. That is not a big deal to stash in a car or stick in a backpack. Of course, if it could not do anything, it would just be wasted weight no matter how small. But since it evidentially can do stuff, I am pretty pleased with it. Granted, one job does not give it a long track record, but it does help confirm all the good things I have heard about it. Biggest potential downside that I have heard of is that people who are used to push pull saws tend to break them by trying to force them to cut on the push stroke. And I have also heard that you can also break them by getting them pinched in the bigger wood (odds are that is why the manufacture says only up to 8″ wood).

Based on the one job I have done with it, I suspect the people who break them by trying to get them to cut on the push stroke are not used to working with their hands. It feels so wrong to even try to cut on the push stroke that I can’t imagine anyone who is paying attention making that mistake with enough force to break the saw.

But knowing that I tend to be hard on tools and being scared by the stories of people breaking them, I sprung for the more expensive outback version of the saw which has a thicker blade. Since I have never used the regular Silky Big Boy, I have no idea if that was wasted money or not.

And below is the path after I put the last piece on the pile and stopped by stop watch.

Path Clear

Are you smarter than a Ukrainian?

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The familiar old judgmental feeling welled up in my heart when I saw news report after news report of Ukrainians forming longs lines to take money out of the bank and looking for food and water to buy the day that Russia invaded. Didn’t they know this was coming? Why were they in a panic to get a stockpile of food and water now?

In a chartable mood, I can sympathize with not trusting America’s intelligence agencies and thinking that Putin was not crazy enough to do what he has done. Maybe I would have been in the same camp if it had not been for some people smarter than me walking me through the available open source information and what it meant from a military perspective. And how many people in Ukraine have the time and inclination to collect the sources of information that I read?

Regardless of whether you are charitable or not, the fact remains that a lot of Ukrainians completely failed to see this coming.

If disaster strikes your country, are you going to be one of those people in a panic trying to buy food in a rapidly emptying grocery store? Or do you think you are smarter then all those Ukrainians who totally failed to see this coming and you will be smart enough to stock up before the general panic sets in?

Of course, there is a third alternative. You could just assume that you don’t know what is going to happen in this crazy world and try to set aside some kind of kit to prepare for the kinds of emergencies that strike this world from time to time. On that note, I read with interests that the Israelis are sending a hundred tons of humanitarian aid composed of…..

“water purification kits, medical equipment as well as drugs, tents, blankets, sleeping bags and additional equipment for civilians who are not in their homes in the cold winter weather”

It sounds very similar to the equipment list I laid out as part of my Yuppie FEMA plan. If you had the all the gear as laid out in that plan, you would be pretty well set up to throw it all in the car and flee. If I felt compelled to do that, the main additional things I would wish I had were a tent, a few full gas cans to extend the range of my vehicle, and a way to charge my cell phones without running my vehicle.

Hopefully, we will never experience a crisis on the scale of what Ukraine is going through now. But you should always remember all the people in Ukraine who held on to that hope without doing anything all the way up to the point when it became a certainty. Maybe that memory will keep you from being just like them.

The Problem With Masonry Stoves

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On the The Rural Working Class FEMA Plan, Deirdre commented….

One thing I often think about is how it would be nice to have an oven. Obviously, worst case scenario, you can bake bread directly over coals, and we probably wouldn’t have the yeast for anything other than flatbread, anyway. But in my imagination, it would be nice to have a nice, woodheated oven…. Even if it was just a fairly short power outage, where running out of food wasn’t a concern, if the generator stopped working, we wouldn’t be able to bake anything. But baking things isn’t a survival necessity, it’s just nice to have. You can live without brownies.

In around about way, this brings up a topic that I did not address in my FEMA series. And that topic is there are lots of cheap things that would be nice to have if society goes all third world on us that I did not talk about or consider because they take a lot of skill to use. I tried to include only things that I imagined would still be useful even if you had little or no skill. And even though masonry stoves are not that hard to build, they do take a fair amount of skill to use. It might be just because I am incompetent at such things, but I would guess that it would take me more then a month to get half way proficient with a wood fired masonry oven. The below video demonstrates some of those issues……

Now some of the David the Good’s problems are because he is always broke and trying to do things as cheap as possible. A roof and more brick would have helped somewhat. And obviously one of his complaints is related to just his climate. But his complaints about the difficulties of cooking with it are going to be the same everywhere.

Of course, people who are more dedicated and less cash constrained can do a much better job then David the Good did. Take a look at these pictures for a oven build that uses far less wood and requires far less maintenance then David the Good’s oven. But it also required a lot more skill and knowledge to build (not to mention money, although I would guess the biggest cost was in the shelter that was built over it). Here is video of a cheap version with little thermal mass version of the stove those pictures in operation.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can bake a lot of things with Dutch ovens with a regular fire beyond the bread the Deirdre mentioned. Below is Paul Harrell making a fairly fancy thanksgiving meal outdoors with Dutch ovens. From a disaster perspective he is cheating by using charcoal but that is because he under a time crunch and working by himself. To duplicate this with wood, you would need someone dedicated to the fire while someone else was cooking and the person tending the fire would need to get started enough in advance of the cook that the fire had a good bed of coals.

Note how much skill and experience goes into making things. The cost of his Dutch ovens is not all that high. But the time investment to figure out how to use them is considerable.

And for those who doubt that Paul’s example has much bearing on a “survival” setting, below is a video of someone doing the same kind of thing in a “survival” setting.

Obviously his meal is not as elaborate but as you can see he uses all the same basic methods.

The bottom line is that there are number of ways you can have an “oven” to bake brownies in (provided you have the supplies to make the brownies). The constraint is not so much monetary as it is time it takes to learn how to do it successfully.

The Rural Working Class FEMA Plan

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency says that “Even though it is unlikely that an emergency would cut off your food supply for two weeks, consider maintaining a supply that will last that long.” And later on in the same document they say “Consider storing at least a two-week supply of water for each member of your family.” Obviously, if food is not available for two weeks a lot has gone wrong with the world and you are likely to want more than just food. A discussion of what it might take to meet this requirement from a “yuppie” point of view was posted here. Originally that post was going to include a rural working poor plan as a kind of contrasting way of looking at the issue. That did not happen due to excessive length of the yuppie plan so in this post we will pick up where we left off.

The Rural Plan

The rural plan is constructed to the same general rules as was laid out in the yuppie post. In other words…

1: This plan is designed to enable a theoretical working rural poor family of four to remain functional and to be part of the solution in the event of an unexpected emergency lasting two weeks in the urban areas. Comfort is not a goal. Rather, the goal is being healthy enough to function normally and having the equipped needed to do things that would make the situation better.

2: The plan is based around what is theoretically necessary to accomplish the above goal in a situation where there is no utilities, no sewer, no gas for vehicles, and no outside emergency support services for the duration of those two weeks in urban areas.

3: All the stuff listed in this plan needs to be functional and ready to use 10 to 20 years in the future even if forgotten and ignored up until it is needed.

4: All the stuff in this plan should be able to fit into a closet. This is more about defining the amount of total storage space sacrificed to disaster preparedness and it is not a requirement of the plan that everything be suitable for storing in a closet. In the abstract it would be better for me to say that total space needed by the plan should be no more than 126 cubic feet (3*6*7) but it is easier to envision a closet then that amount of space in the abstract.

5: The assumption behind this plan is that the theoretical family lives in the northeast and have to deal with weather and water resources typically for that region.

6: Budget for this plan is $800. It was figured on the grounds that seems to be roughly the amount that working class families I am familiar with spend on a “vacation” if they don’t have a lot of money but are gainfully employed.

Except for the budget, everything above is the same as the yuppie plan. But our assumptions about the nature of a theoretical rural working class family are going to be different then our assumptions about the yuppie family.

Assumptions: If you live in South Carolina and you are prepared for the impact of 4 inches of snow, you are prepared for a particular type of emergency situation that while possible will rarely happen. If you live in upstate New York and you are prepared for four inches of snow, you are simply competent to deal with everyday life. Same logic holds true for the difference between living in a rural area and a subdivision. In a rural area, a power outage that last for a few days is not out of ordinary even if it is not something that happens every year. On the other hand, if a subdivision loses power for a few days it is a big deal. It is for this reason that many rural people I know think that they are better prepared for a disaster then their yuppie counterparts. They heat with wood. They have a freezer full of food. They have guns and know how to hunt. They have been without electricity for awhile and it was no big deal. And so on and so forth.

But an emergency by definition is something that we don’t expect. Rural working poor are in general more prepared for utility interruptions because they expect them but that does not mean they are any better prepared for a true emergency. For example, we read this about the 1998 Quebec ice storm:

Many power lines broke and over 1,000 transmission towers collapsed in chain reactions under the weight of the ice, leaving more than 4 million people without electricity, most of them in southern Quebec, western New Brunswick and Eastern Ontario, some of them for an entire month.

Most of the urban areas had power back in days or at most a week. It was the rural areas that waited more than a month for power to be restored. So a disaster that means a yuppie needs a two week kit means that the rural person might be looking at a month or more of roughing it. That is why we define our two weeks in terms of urban centers being without for two weeks. It always takes longer for the rural areas to have services restored so if it is rational for suburban folks to be prepared for two weeks, the rural family should be prepared for longer.

Not only are rural areas last in line for any kind of help and relief, but disasters can have problems for rural areas that don’t even impact urban areas. For example, earthquakes can have a negative impacts on wells for weeks after the earthquake happened. You might think that earthquake related well issues can’t impact you because you don’t live in an area prone to earthquakes but consider this….

The 1998 M5.2 Pymatuning earthquake in northwestern Pennsylvania caused about 120 local household-supply wells to go dry within 3 months after the earthquake (Fleeger and others, 1999). The 2002 M7.9 Denali Fault earthquake in Alaska caused a 2-foot water-level rise in a well in Wisconsin, more than a thousand miles from the epicenter.

Now imagine a another New Madrid style earthquake that devastates America’s heartland and leads to all kinds of supply shortages as pipelines and highways critical to bringing supplies to the northeast are disrupted. Your house is standing and you are well outside the areas impacted by major shaking but somehow your well was still impacted. How fast is someone going to fix your well when the rest of the world is having trouble getting gasoline because the pipelines that transport it are out of commission?

These types of scenarios are not very likely. But the entire point of an emergency kit is to prepare for the unlikely but possible. If something is truly likely, you should spend a lot more time an effort preparing for it than is envisioned by this kit.

So for this list, our assumptions are going to be a little different than they were for the Yuppie list. We are going to assume that our rural working class family of four is prepared for normal run of the mill power outages. We will assume they are used to working with their hands and solving problems. We will also assume that they have all the normal tools to solve normal rural problems such as chainsaws and firearms. We will take it for granted that they heat with wood and have clothing appropriate for their climate. In short, we will assume they all ready for likely problems that come along in a rural environment.

Since we assume that the rural family is already equipped for likely rural problems, we are going to set up the kit augment what a rural household typically already has. We will build this kit with the assumption that anything that causes urban areas to go two weeks without resupply will be that much worse in the rural areas. Since this is a shelter in place kit, we will assume that that the house remains standing and the wood stoves is still working but other then that, we are not going to assume that any of the modern appliances found in a rural home will actual work.

The Question: What can you get for $800 dollars that will expand a rural working class family of four’s ability to deal with serious systematic disasters not normal to rural life? My list is as follows…..

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The Yuppie FEMA Plan

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency says that “Even though it is unlikely that an emergency would cut off your food supply for two weeks, consider maintaining a supply that will last that long.” And later on in the same document they say “Consider storing at least a two-week supply of water for each member of your family.” Using this document as an authority, we can say that being prepared for two weeks is the Boy Scout level of preparation. If you are at this level, nobody can consider you paranoid because you are just a good little citizen doing what your government recommends that you should do.

But what does it really mean to be prepared for two weeks cut off from resupply of food and water? Honestly speaking, if your sole goal is to stay alive then you likely don’t need to do anything. Most everyone would still be alive if all power, sewer, clean water, and other supplies were cut off for a period of two weeks. The frail might die, but everyone else has enough spare fat and could drink bad water if they had to. At the end of the two week period many people might be sick and weak, but they would not be dead.

If your goal is a little higher than just staying alive, then you have to define what you are looking for. Do you want perfect comfort just as if the disaster never happened? Do you just want to remain healthy until the cavalry arrives to saves the day? On the other paw, you also have to consider what you are willing to do to achieve your goals. After all, if money is no object, we would all pick riding out the disaster in perfect comfort. But it takes effort and money to prepare for things and we all have a finite supply of both.

What follows is two separate “FEMA Plans” constructed as a thought experiment to aide me in my ponderings of the subject. One plan is constructed for a yuppie family of four living in a suburban environment. The other plan is constructed for a rural working poor family of four. What differs between the two plans is budget and assumptions as to the capabilities of the theoretical family in question. What both plans have in common is the following…..

1. Both plans are designed to enable the theoretical families to remain functional and to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Comfort is not a goal. Rather, the goal is being healthy enough to function normally and having the equipped needed to do things that would make the situation better.
2. The plan is based around what is theoretically necessary to accomplish the above goal in a situation where there is no utilities, no sewer, no gas for vehicles, and no outside emergency support services for the duration of those two weeks.
3. All the stuff listed in these plans needs to be functional and ready to use 10 to 20 years in the future even if forgotten and ignored up until it is needed.
4. All the stuff in one of these plans should be able to fit into a closet. This is more about defining the amount of total storage space sacrificed to disaster preparedness and it is not a requirement of the plan that everything be suitable for storing in a closet. In the abstract it would be better for me to say that total space needed by the plan should be no more than 126 cubic feet (3*6*7) but it is easier to envision a closet then that amount of space in the abstract.
5. The assumption behind both plans is that the families live in the northeast and have to deal with weather and water resources typically for that region.
6. Budget for both plans is defined ahead of time and items are chosen to fit within that budget. For the “yuppie” plan the budget for this plan was derived from the one year cost in annual premiums if a healthy 30 year old male signed up for whole life insurance to the tune of $500,000. Buying life whole life insurance seems like a very middle class thing to do so the assumption is if they can afford to do that on a regular basis then they can afford pay that amount out once to prepare for FEMA style emergencies. At the time this plan was put together, that premium cost was estimated to be $4015 per year and so that is our budget number to stay under for the yuppie plan. For the rural working poor plan the budget is $800 on the grounds that seems to be roughly the amount that they spend on a “vacation” if they don’t have a lot of money but are gainfully employed

We will consider the “yuppie” plan first.

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World War II, Food Insecurity, And the Modern Situation.

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The lack of sufficient food and outright famine was widespread problem in World War II although it is not something most Americans are aware of. Typically, the urban areas had it worst. This was partially because those in the countryside were growing their own food and partially because of German policy. Take the “Hunger Plan” for example……

The German “Hunger Plan” called for “the annihilation of what the German régime perceived as a superfluous population (Jews, and the population of Ukrainian large cities such as Kiev, which received no supplies at all); extreme reduction of rations for Ukrainians in the remaining cities; and reduction in foodstuffs consumed by the farming population.”

Now this plan was not fully implemented, but there were massive famines in the Ukraine. And from everything I have read, those in the countryside faired far better than those in urban areas in part because it was impossible for the Germans to get farmers to grow food for them and at the same time prevent the farmers from feeding themselves. Also, disruptions in supply lines from the fighting impacted the urban areas that needed to import their food a lot more then it impacted the rural areas that grew the food. We can see this same dynamic (urban famine, rural areas doing comparatively better) all over Europe.

One example would the be the “Great Famine” in Greece. As Wikipedia puts it (emphasis mine)…..

The nutritional situation became critical in the summer of 1941 and in the autumn turned into a full-blown famine. Especially in the first winter of occupation (1941–42) food shortage was acute and famine struck especially in the urban centers of the country. Food shortage reached a climax and a famine was unavoidable. During that winter the mortality rate reached a peak, while according to British historian, Mark Mazower, this was the worst famine the Greeks experienced from ancient times. Bodies of dead persons were secretly abandoned in cemeteries or at the streets (possibly so their ration cards could continue to be used by surviving relatives). In other cases, bodies were found days after the death had taken place. The sight of emaciated dead bodies was commonplace in the streets of Athens.

The situation in Athens and the wider area with its port, Piraeus, was out of control, the hyperinflation was in full swing and the price of bread was increased 89-fold from April 1941 to June 1942. According to the records of the German army the mortality rate in Athens alone reached 300 deaths per day during December 1941, while the estimates of the Red Cross were much higher, at 400 deaths while in some days the death toll reached 1,000. Apart from the urban areas the population of the islands was also affected by the famine, especially those living in Mykonos, Syros and Chios.

There are no accurate numbers of the famine deaths because civil registration records did not function during the occupation. In general, it is estimated that Greece suffered approximately 300,000 deaths during the Axis occupation as a result of famine and malnutrition. However, not all parts of Greece experienced equal levels of food scarcity. Although comprehensive data on regional famine severity does not exist, the available evidence indicates that the severe movement restrictions, the proximity to agricultural production and the level of urbanization were crucial factors of famine mortality.

We can read similar things about the Dutch famine during World War II. Again, going by Wikipedia (emphasis mine) …..

Food stocks in the cities in the western Netherlands rapidly ran out. The adult rations in cities such as Amsterdam dropped to below 1000 calories (4,200 kilojoules) a day by the end of November 1944 and to 580 calories in the west by the end of February 1945. Over this Hongerwinter (“Hunger winter”), a number of factors combined to cause starvation in especially the large cities in the West of the Netherlands. The winter in the month of January 1945 itself was unusually harsh prohibiting transport by boat for roughly a month between early January 1945 and early February 1945. Also, the German army destroyed docks and bridges to flood the country and impede the Allied advance. Thirdly, Allied bombing made it extremely difficult to transport food in bulk, since Allied bombers could not distinguish German military and civilian shipments. As the south-eastern (the Maas valley) and the south-western part of the Netherlands (Walcheren and Beveland) became one of the main western battlefields, these conditions combined to make the transport of existing food stocks in large enough quantities nearly impossible.

The areas affected were home to 4.5 million people. Butter disappeared after October 1944, shortly after railway transport to the western parts of the Netherlands had stopped in September due to the railway strike. The supply of vegetable fats dwindled to a minuscule seven-month supply of 1.3 liters per person. At first 100 grams of cheese were allotted every two weeks; the meat coupons became worthless. The bread ration had already dropped from 2,200 to 1,800 and then to 1,400 grams per week. Then it fell to 1,000 grams in October, and by April 1945 to 400 grams a week. Together with one kilogram of potatoes, this then formed the entire weekly ration. The black market increasingly ran out of food as well, and with the gas and electricity and heat turned off, everyone was very cold and very hungry. In search of food, young strong people would walk for tens of kilometers to trade valuables for food at farms. Tulip bulbs and sugar beets were commonly consumed. Furniture and houses were dismantled to provide fuel for heating.

In the last months of 1944, in anticipation of the coming famine, tens of thousands of children were brought from the cities to rural areas where many remained until the end of the war. Deaths in the three big cities of the Western Netherlands (The Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam) started in earnest in December 1944, reaching a peak in March 1945, but remained very high in April and May 1945. In early summer 1945 the famine was brought quickly under control. From September 1944 until May 1945 the deaths of 18,000 Dutch people were attributed to malnutrition as the primary cause and in many more as a contributing factor.

There are a lot of other similar stories that could be told about World War II but the bottom line is that food scarcity was an issue in many areas during World War II and it always seemed to hit hardest in the urban areas. Now I think to a lot of people this is sort of like announcing that water is wet. Who would expect anything differently?

But the fact that the experience of World War II accords with people’s natural expectations is precisely the problem. The things that enabled rural areas to do better during times of food shortages at the time of World War II no longer hold true and yet I don’t think people have updated their thinking to account for the changes.

As Chelsea Green’s “A Short History of the Agricultural Seed” says (emphasis mine)……

These changes didn’t “take” with farmers overnight. First of all, many of these inputs were expensive, and most farmers were not operating on a cash-intensive system—they produced all or most of their own fertility, feed, and seed for their farms. Pesticides, nitrogen fertilizer, and even tractors wouldn’t become commonplace on North American or European farms until after World War II, and even later in other parts of the world. The main source of fuel on the farm was the grain and hay produced on-farm for horses. It’s hard to believe now that only 100 years ago, even in countries that were rapidly industrializing, most of the population lived on farms that were largely self-sufficient, breeding their own animals and growing their crops from seed they had grown.

I don’t think many people have fully internalized how unprecedented modern times are compared to most of recorded history. Urban areas have always been vulnerable to the collapse of complicated supply lines since the time of the Bronze Age collapse. Rome famously lived in fear of its grain supplies being cut off just as much as Great Britain feared submarines. But at the time of World War II a farmer in Great Britain could feed himself even if there were not enough famers in Great Britain to feed the largely urban population of what was one of the most urbanized countries in the world at the time. But now a farmer cannot feed himself without the aid of a long and complicated supply line anymore then a city dweller can.

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