Category Archives: Preparedness

Thoughts on Microsoft as a single point of failure

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Yesterday I read an article on Ars Technica called “Why the US government’s overreliance on Microsoft is a big problem.” It was one of those things that I read that did not make the cut as I did not think there was anything educational enough in the article to be worth passing along. But one comment in the article about the reliance of Microsoft in effect creating a huge single point of failure stuck with me and made me think long after I could no longer remember what else was in the article.

One of the things that bugs me is when people talk about how to government should do this or do that to prepare for some possible disaster but don’t take responsibility for doing even the smallest things themselves. If people took even small steps towards preparedness it would make them less of a burden in those same disasters and in aggregate be more beneficial most things people want the government to do. So if you think it is stupid for the government to create a massive over reliance on Microsoft what are you doing in your life that makes it so you have alternatives?

On one hand, my reaction to those thoughts is that if Microsoft and its products ever fail in a systematic way I will have much bigger problems then if I have a spare laptop that can run a Linux distro or not. Also, I have limited bandwidth to deal with various contingencies and things like clean water or ways to deal with gas shortages seem higher on the list then the ability to use a computer.

On the other hand, this reaction is tempered by my recent experience with the COVID pandemic. If you had asked me prior to everything kicking off what would be the likely result of a pandemic, I would have talked about supply chain disruptions. This would have been no act of genius on my part. The historical record clearly indicates that those are common problems during serious pandemics and everyone pre-COVID who bothered to think about pandemics had the same concerns. So this was no great genius on my part but the experience of COVID showed that those concerns are well founded (even if in COVID’s case the issues were more caused by mass hysteria then any real impact caused by COVID itself).

But what I would not have predicted is that the single best prep for my extended family would be an investment in increasing the reliability and speed of the internet connection. In fact, if you had asked me prior to COVID if spending money on better internet was a good way to prepare for a pandemic, I would have told you no. I would have said that it was better to spend the money on backup power sources/greater food storage instead. And maybe if the Black Death came again I would have been right.

As it turns out, Black Death has not yet come again. And for our particular family and for the particular insanity that was COVID, investing in better internet was best preparation that could have been done even though it was not done for that reason. I guess the lesson here is that becoming more resilient is not all about preparing for the end of the world. Sometimes it is worth investing in a little redundancy in the things that are important to you just because you never know what kind of curve balls will be thrown at you.

I would not invest a couple of hours to make it so that I had a slim chance to play computer games even if someone hijacked Microsoft’s update system to bring down everyone with a windows computer. But would I invest a few hours to enable myself to still have some word processing and maybe basic spreadsheet abilities simply by creating a way to boot up my laptop on Linux if I wanted to? If the cost for doing so really was that low (as rumor has it) maybe it is something I should move up on my to do list.

The Problem With Most Demographic Doomers

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In 1930 there were a lot of people who would have predicted that communism would be a major threat to the western way of life (including the communist themselves who had this as an openly avowed goal). The first “red scares” date to shortly after World War I and never went away as a concern for the religious, the small farmers, and the business elite. This fear of the communists would lead many to embrace or at least tolerate fascism on the grounds that it was a useful counterweight to the communists. No one up to the time that World War II started would have thought that next world war would have been fought against the fascists by both communists and the Anglo-Saxon world. Such an alliance would have been inconceivable to those who knew the level of hate and distrust between the ruling classes in the Anglo-Saxon World and the Soviet Union.

The people who predicted that communism would be a major threat to the Anglo-Saxon world were right. But those who sole matrix for looking at the world was communism and the huge threat it presented were often the most blind to dangers posed by the Nazis. Churchill was a famous exception this rule, but even he did not start warning about the rise of Germany until 1933. And his supposed fellow conservative Neville Chamberlain would write “The real danger to this country is Winston. He is the warmonger, not Hitler.” What is often forgotten is that Chamberlain way of looking at the world was the rule on the right and Churchill was exception. Conservatives by and large were blind to the threat posed by the Nazis because they feared communism so much.

Fast forward to today and many are obsessed with demographics and with good reason. There is no more sure guide to the future available to mankind then the study of demographics. We might not know how many people will die in the next 20 years, but we can say with a high degree of confidence what the maximum number of 20 year old can exist in 20 years time because those people will have been born today. And those numbers are so horrific for many countries that those who are aware of the numbers can’t stop thinking about them or interpreting everything they see in the light of those numbers. But there are more things that can profoundly change our world then just a free fall in the numbers of babies being born as bad as that can be over the long term.

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Fire in the Rain without Matches

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About 20 minutes and he is better then you or I are likely to ever be. Although part of that is because he did not have any really easy resources in range of his house (like birch).

Lessons learned….

1. This is why you carry tinder if you can. Saves a lot of time.
2. Tie something high vise orange 550 cord or something like that to your ferro rod. You can’t rely on not being an idiot when you are under pressure.
3. If you can have a fixed blade knife on you it will work a lot better when you really need a knife then a folder.
4. All that said, you don’t need much to get a fire going if you have time. When you are short on time that is what makes skill and gear so much more important.

Why you should panic about the US Deficit

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*Note: This is an informal note that is not directly related to my last essay. The second part of that is still to come.*

Notwithstanding the headline, I don’t really think that panic accomplishes anything useful. But I am amazed that we are looking at a catastrophe and hardly anyone is talking about it. The current situation is the opposite of the “food crisis” that I addressed last year. At the time I talked about how even though there were a lot of bad headlines when you looked into the actual numbers there was no crisis in the immediate near term (it might be different now at least in terms of rice, but I have not really dug into the numbers yet for this year). But in terms of the US deficit, very few people seem to be panicking and yet when you dig into the numbers they are really bad.

So I thought I would write a short informal piece to break down the headlines that I have been linking to and explain why they represent a catastrophe in the making that will directly impact your life. Let us start with a recent CNN story titled “Federal budget deficit expected to nearly double to around $2 trillion.”

Now, if you are a typical American redneck, you will see a head line like that and sagely tell whoever is next to you “the politicians are going to bankrupt this country” and then go on with your business without giving the headline another thought. And who can really blame the typical redneck for reacting like that? In 2020 the Federal Government ran 3.1 trillion dollar deficit and in 2021 the feds ran a 2.8 trillion dollar deficit. It is true that in 2022 the deficit was just over a trillion dollars but if the world did not come to end back in 2020 or 2021 then, why should a mere 2 trillion dollar deficit be a cause of panic today?

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