Also on iodine, there was a product out there called “Polar Pure” that I fucking love

Unfortunately, it was basically just a bottle of pure iodine crystals, so they got caught up in some new anti-drug regulations and got shut down because iodine can be used to make meth.

But it was a great product, and if you look around you can still find new old stock. It has an indefinite shelf life (iodine crystals don’t go bad) and one bottle was enough to treat something like 2,000L of water.

You filled the bottle up with water, some of the iodine would dissolve into it, and you’d use a capful or so of that concentrated iodine solution to disinfect your drinking water. It had a special bottle design to keep the iodine crystals trapped inside when you poured the liquid out.

Pure iodine crystals aren’t exactly an easy thing to get your hands on, but if anyone is able to that’s probably a good way to go.

Pretty much exactly what it sounds like, water that comes in blue cans. The manufacturer claims it has a 50 year shelf life or something.

It costs several times what regular bottled water does, and it’s literally just water, not flavored or sparkling or enhanced with any vitamins or electrolytes or anything, just water in a can. It’s kind of a stupid thing to buy, and arguably you’d be better off just filling up some sturdy jugs from your tap and treating it with a couple drops of bleach and dumping it down the drain every so often, but I can also see the convenience of a buy-one-cry-once set-it-and-forget it prep like that.

I’m “lucky” (Also I’m overall very pro-nuclear, don’t let those sarcasm quotes give anyone the wrong impression) that I live in the evacuation zone for a nuclear plant, so my county distributes potassium iodide for residents in this area (for anyone paying enough attention to put their name on the list to have it sent to you or to stop by the office to pick it up) so that’s one thing I don’t really have to put any money or effort into stockpiling.

I’m not particularly concerned about the plant, and I’m not in an area that’s likely to get nuked if WWIII really gets going, though I may need to worry about fallout depending on the wind.

Definitely good advice and we are cycling things.

Our plan is focusing on dry goods that probably would last a couple years (maybe with some loss of nutrients/quality) just sitting in your pantry as long as it’s reasonably clean, dry, and no bug or rodent issues. I can’t say that I’ve ever had things like flour, rice, or beans go bad on me, and I’ve definitely pulled some out of my pantry that have been sitting there for a couple years.

And we’re further hedging our bets vacuum sealing them in mason jars with moisture and oxygen absorber packets.

For anyone doing the same, a paper cupcake/muffin wrapper in the top of the jar allegedly helps keep your vacuum sealer from sucking up any dust from your food. It didn’t seem like that was a major issue when we were doing it without, but I figure it can’t hurt either.

The thing we struggle with is cycling emergency water supplies. We don’t tend to use any sort of bottled water, water quality from our tap is actually pretty good (if a bit hard) and we put it through a filter anyway, so we never really think about cycling out whatever jugs or bottles we try to stockpile. I may have to bite the bullet and order a couple cases of that stupid blue can water or something.

I have a slight tendency towards paranoia and over-preparedness, it’s something I know about myself and keep in check, I don’t want to be the weirdo living in a bunker full of spam and guns. I keep it to a reasonable level of preparedness, a little extra food, a battery backup for my sump pump, some tools, blankets, water, etc. in the trunk of my car, etc. I’m seldom caught unprepared for anything that might come up, but I’m not actively stockpiling for the end of the world.

My wife tends to fly by the seat of her pants a bit more. I remember when I ran out to buy the backup battery for the sump pump before a big storm she asked if I really thought we’d need it. We ended up losing power for 16 hours, and while that battery didn’t last the whole time, it at least bought us a few extra hours of not having to bail out the sump pump with buckets to keep our basement from flooding.

So I definitely took notice when a couple months ago she started wanting to buy some rice and beans and such in bulk to vacuum seal so we’d have a bit of a stockpile on-hand if things started getting rough. If she’s starting to get worried like that, it usually means things are already pretty damn bad.

So I’ve been kicking my usual casual emergency preps up a notch, still holding myself back from becoming a full-on bunker weirdo, but fuck if that’s not starting to look kind of attractive.

I remember seeing a comment somewhere wishing they would reboot Xena, but lamenting that they would probably make it “too woke” if they did

I don’t think there’s much they could do to make Xena more “woke” if they tried.

ICE said that after Noviello was found unresponsive, medical staff “immediately” performed CPR and used an electronic defibrillator to try and revive him, before calling 911.

This could be something lost in translation, which does happen a lot with news articles

But that specific phrasing, that they performed CPR and used a defibrillator before calling 911 rubs me the wrong way

Basically the moment you determine CPR or a defibrillator might possibly be needed, someone should be calling 911 unless you are already in a hospital.

Bringing someone back with CPR is basically a statistical anomaly, most of the time all it does is buy you a bit of extra time to get them to a hospital.

And defibrillators, especially automatic ones, are only effective for certain abnormal heart rhythms (AEDs only do ventricular fibrilation, manual defibrillators can handle a couple more things, but contrary to what movies may have you think, you’re not going to “restart” anyone’s heart who’s flatlining with a defibrillator, it’s more like turning the heart off and hoping it restarts itself and stops doing what it was doing before, more of a reboot than a jumpstart)

I don’t know what kind of medical staff and equipment they have on-hand at an ICE detention center, but I somehow doubt they have a well-enough-equipped medical center that they’re prepared to handle a cardiac arrest 100% in-house with no need to send them out to a hospital.

I’m a fat, on-and-off smoker. Once in a while I get it in my head I’m gonna exercise and I start running or something. It usually doesn’t last very long, running sucks.

But the one time it almost stuck was when I decided to do it as sort of a new years resolution when we were getting hit by some crazy polar vortex weather with temperatures hovering just barely above 0°F (about -17°C)

It was great, no matter how hard I tried to run I couldn’t work up a sweat.

That cold, dry air is kind of rough on your lungs though, so I tied a bandana around my face so I could breathe some warmer, moister air.

The bandana got soaked with condensation from my breath, and since it was so cold it pretty much froze solid the second I took it off at the end of my run. Then the condensation in my beard and mustache froze into icicles.

So the best runs of my life were done breathing through 2 layers of wet fabric. Anyone who claims that they can’t breathe through a mask is either full of shit or probably needs to be on a ventilator.

I work in 911 dispatch

During COVID we had to ask all of our callers some extra questions if they were going to be in contact with any of our units

Something along the lines of “has anyone there had or been in contact with anyone who has had flu-like symptoms recently?”

And if they did we added a note to the call indicating that.

One night I got a call from one of our off-duty officers calling in an accident he witnessed.

I get all the usual information and start asking our COVID questions

And he gets really indignant about it “why are you asking me this?” “This is stupid.” Etc.

Like dude, you’re one of our officers. We’ve been advising you about potential COVID exposures on your own calls, where do you think we were getting that information? This shit is for your benefit, not ours, I can’t catch COVID from someone over the phone (the disease vectors sitting the consoles adjacent to me could be another story)

And that’s pretty typical of how cops act towards us, the people they rely on to give them information they need to do their jobs, send them backup when needed, etc. blows my mind that so many of my co-workers are absolute bootlickers.

So I did not read the article because of a paywall I’m too lazy to circumvent right now

But from OP’s summary, the main technology they’re talking about is concrete reinforced with steel or other fibers.

And that’s definitely more advanced than “pyramid age”

But it’s also pretty much a direct descendant of mud brick reinforced with straw which humanity has been using since well before the pyramids. Same basic concept, different materials.

So yes and no.

My dude, I think someone needs to tell you, Russia is part of the imperialist west now. Has been for a while. They’re maybe not always in agreement with the rest of the West, but the disagreement is only over who should be the top dog, not over any deeper philosophical/sociological/political/economic/etc. differences.

They’re not championing communism and haven’t for decades, arguably they haven’t since well-before the USSR officially fell apart.

They drank deep from the capitalist kool-aid, to the point that they’re almost a parody of crony capitalism taken to its most ridiculous extreme. You know all the talk of oligarchs and Putin’s yachts, and all of that? What part of that sounds like redistributing the wealth and seizing the means of production for the working class to you?

I’m sorry you have to find out this way comrade, I can only assume that you spent most of the last half century or so in a coma to not know this. I know the revolution must go on, but for now you should really focus on your physical therapy, and maybe catch up a bit on all that has happened. If you’re going around this uninformed, you’re not going to be able to advance the cause in any sort of meaningful way.

Funeral rites and traditions vary a lot around the world. I don’t know the specifics in Russia, but I know in some places traditionally family has played a big part in preparing the body for burial- cleaning it and dressing it and such, . There may also be additional religious rituals and such that would be performed.

But at the very least, I’m pretty sure that almost anywhere in the world would normally give the next of kin che opportunity to see the corpse if just to confirm that it is in fact their relative they’re about to bury.

Not that I particularly like this, but this isn’t exactly something new.

For most of my life, my mom worked a clerical job at a local elementary school, so I got some decent glimpses behind the curtain of my local school district.

Our district was all-around pretty well-regarded, some nearby districts, put bluntly, were not, and it wasn’t unheard of for parents in those other districts to try to send their kids to our schools. Maybe they moved out of the district and didn’t update their address, or they listed a friend or relative’s address in our district as their home address, etc. and every day their parents would drop them off at a bus stop in our district.

And I certainly don’t blame those parents for trying.

But our district did have someone whose job was to verify residency in those kinds of cases, they’d interview people and stake out bus stops and such. I imagine that a lot of districts do something similar.

Now they weren’t doing random checks on students based on nothing, they only investigated if they had some credible reason to believe the student didn’t live in our district- they received a tip from someone, or a student told someone that it was happening (sadly a decent amount of them came from younger elementary school students who didn’t get what was going on and they let it slip that they lived in another town)

Now of course, this article could be about something a lot more creepy and invasive, the article doesn’t really have much for me to go on.

It’s a shitty situation all-around. Every kid of course deserves to have the highest-quality education possible. Unfortunately, educating children isn’t cheap, in general you’re looking at in the neighborhood of about $10-20k per student per year at a public school in the US (paid for out of taxes and government funding and such, we’re not that bad of a capitalist hellhole that you need to shell out 10+ grand out of pocket every year to send your kids to public school.) A handful of extra students in a district can add up to some pretty significant extra expenses, I can certainly think of a few things I wish my school could have thrown a few thousand at back when I was in school, and maybe they could have if we had less kids attending our school who didn’t actually live in our district (although I don’t exactly have great confidence that our district would have allocated those extra funds appropriately if that were the case, as always, the issues at play are many and complicated)

Kind of reminds me of the daisyworld simulation.

It’s been a long time since I read about it, so I may possibly miss some details.

Daisyworld simulates a planet entirely covered by 2 species of daisy- black ones and white ones.

The black ones are better able to absorb the suns rays, so initially outcompete the white ones, however because they’re absorbing more of the rays, that leads to the planet warming up.

At a certain point the planets temperature gets too warm and the black daisies start dying off. Since the white daisies are better able to reflect the sun’s rays, they’re less effected by the increased temperature and start to outcompete the black ones.

After a while the white daisies are dominant, and since most of the planet is now reflecting the sun’s rays the temperature starts to drop, until it gets to a point where it’s too cold for the white daisies but since the black daisies can absorb more of the sun they start to outcompete the black ones again

Lather, rinse, repeat until they reach a sort of equilibrium.

I don’t have any significant mental health issues, but I can see the appeal.

Sometimes you just really need to get stuff off of your chest. Ideally you have people close to you that you can vent to, but some people don’t, and even if you do, sometimes they’re just the wrong kind of people to have that sort of conversation with.

And just being able to say something out loud can help you figure things out on your own. Sowe programmers and such do “rubber duck debugging” where they just explain the code and the issues they’re having to a rubber duck or stuffed animal or something on their desk, and the act of talking through it sort of engages different parts of your brain and often that’s enough to find the issue (I remember one time back in high school I was taking a programming class, I was presenting my project to the class, it worked, but it was a mess of ugly spaghetti code, and as I was up there explaining it out loud for the first time, something just clicked and I realized how I could have done it a much better way.) Some people feel really stupid talking to a rubber duck though (especially if it’s someone who’s already afraid that people think they’re “crazy”) so having an actual human to talk to could be really helpful for them.

And a lot of these things have other resources they can offer. They may be able to help you find a support group, therapist, housing assistance, have some sort of a crisis team they can send out to meet with you, etc.

And for what it’s worth, I work in 911 dispatch. This will vary a lot around the country of course, but while we certainly do get a decent amount of calls from crisis hotlines, they’re basically all for people who are in imminent danger of harming themselves. And the number of those calls I get is absolutely tiny in comparison to the amount of calls I’ve transferred to 988 and our police never so much as drove past the callers house.

“large” is relative.

Unless you’re incredibly thorough about totally cleaning out the vault, ATM, every teller drawer, etc. you’re probably not gonna be able to get more than a few 10s of thousands if you’re lucky

But even a few thousand, or hell, even a couple hundred could be huge for a lot of people.

That might be rent for a month or a couple of months when they’re really struggling, what they need to keep their car from getting repo’d so they can get to their job, pay for some badly needed home repairs, medications, etc.

I’m not struggling, but I’m not exactly doing great either, a couple extra thousand bucks on-hand would be amazing for me, and for some people it could be literally life-changing (even life-saving)

I mean, it probably takes about as long for me to remove the seats from the van as it does for me to find a broom and sweep out the truck bed to make sure my mattress doesn’t get dirty because I’ve been using my truck as a truck, so six of one, half dozen of the other.

And truck bed or roof rack I’m anal about securing my loads, so I’m gonna spend a few minutes fucking with ratchet straps either way, box springs are light so unless you’re really short it’s pretty trivial to get them on a roof rack.

Plus you get the benefit of being able to carry more passengers when you need to. Haven’t found a pickup yet that will seat 7 or 8 people.

Probably not in a minivan, but I’ve personally loaded pallets into cargo vans with a forklift

I’ve moved many a mattress in my parent’s minivan. With the seats folded down or removed and a bit of an angle and/or squishing in a bit you can usually fit a queen, maybe even a king depending on the mattress and van. Box springs are harder, but often still doable, and in a pinch can be easily strapped to a roof rack.

They also have a '93 ranger with the 7ft bed, still chose to use the van for mattresses as often as not, to need to strap anything down or cover them if there’s rain in the forecast.

I did a road trip with my wife a few years back and borrowed their Sedona, took out the back seats, threw a “queen” sized air mattress (I’m pretty sure it was a little undersized from a real mattress, but still pretty close) and the mattress was a little squished on the sides but otherwise fit pretty comfortably in the back, we slept in the van for about a week moving between different campsites.

Know what mattresses don’t fit comfortably in? The 5.5ft beds a lot of pickup trucks have these days.

I don’t think it’s so much about what he did as VP as much as the fact that his time as VP kind of set him up to run for president later.