Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm | Hacker News Reader

Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

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220 pointsmooreds388 comments

For some context from someone who's been on that Res, its population is highly vulnerable with no margin for mishaps. It's a place of generational, crushing poverty, crime, illness, genetic-exacerbated substance abuse, broad lack of economic opportunity, cultural isolation, and federal disinvestment.

Free federal healthcare is available, but only at an IHS hospital in Rapid City 1.5 hours away in good weather: it's antiquated and maximally bureaucratic and probably lower standards of care than your vet provides.

The local Habitat for Humanity chapter (I served on their board) tried to help them with community housing efforts, but houses were always gutted of all fixtures before completion.

IMO, at a minimum, the IHS (and the VA) need to merge under Medicare for standardization, availability, and economics of scale and industry needs incentives to bring employment opportunities (I think Cisco tried once and bailed).

> genetic-exacerbated substance abuse

Could you expand on this a bit? Not a concept I am familiar with

Not parent, but this is a generally accepted thing, e.g.

https://www.bumc.bu.edu/genetics/research/substance-abuse/

That paper also seems to heavily qualify the findings, implying that environmental factors may dominate genetic ones (or may not, the point is that we don't know):

However, these loci explain only a small proportion of the genetic variance. The “missing heritability” may be explained by other genetic mechanisms and gene*environment interactions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans#G...

Alcoholism rates among Native Americans is higher than most groups, which leads some to suspect a genetic reason. Currently, there isn't a ton of evidence supporting that idea.

There is also severe distrust of western medicine and science in many Native American communities which makes doing studies hard.

I knew about the alcoholism rates, but had always assumed it was a socio-economic / situational driven thing.

I understand that historically it was used in some sense to control and indeed damage the Native Americans by the colonists? To what extent alcohol was completely new etc I do not know

It is very hard to tease genetic factors out from socio-economic ones, but IMHO it seems plausible that a population that has been exposed to alcohol for a long time (hundreds of generations) may have been better selected for higher tolerance than a population that has been exposed only recently (a few dozen generations, and with modern technology making selection pressure lower in general).

The evo-bio story of alcohol is confusing though, since fermentation has been present in East Asia as long as anywhere, and there's a large part of the population there that has the alcohol flush reaction.

You could tell the story as like, alcohol puts pressure on a population to evolve better responses, and with enough time the flush evolves and that helps limit drinking. But that's pretty just-so.

Yeah, I'm not saying that this is actually true, only that it's not absurd on its face. As I understand it (and I am absolutely not an expert here) North American indigenous populations separated from Asians at the end of the ice age, i.e. ~10,000 years ago, and since then had no exposure to alcohol. That seems like plenty of time for genetic predisposition to alcohol tolerance to be reduced. So it's possible and worthy of serious consideration and investigation. Whether it's actually true is a completely different question, one where the jury is still pretty clearly out.

This is simply not true. Indigenous peoples of mesoamerica have drunk fermented maize beverages for as long as maize has been cultivated. Tejuino is still a quite popular drink in Mexico.

Arguably what has changed is the ABV of such beverages. Post-industrial alcohol percentages are way higher than what precolonial mesoamericans, ancient Greeks, and vikings we're drinking

> Indigenous peoples of mesoamerica

OK, but Pine Ridge is in North America. There could have been enough isolation in pre-Columbian times for north American indigenous to evolve a different alcohol response from mesoamericans.

Like I said: I am not an expert, and I have no idea whether this hypothesis is true or not. I'm just not aware of any facts that would rule it out.

> You could tell the story as like, alcohol puts pressure on a population to evolve better responses, and with enough time the flush evolves and that helps limit drinking. But that's pretty just-so.

The "alcohol flush" reaction seems to be genetically conserved in Asia because it gives resistance to rice pathogens not because it protects against "alcoholism".

I think one thing to clarify here is that western Europeans have thousands of years of history brewing and drinking alcoholic beverages, but it was only in the past 250 years that heavily DISTILLED alcoholic beverages like whiskey at affordable prices became a thing. Have greater than 5 percent ABV in a beverage would've been a bit rarer preindustrial revolution I believe. Even heavily DISTILLED high proof colonial rum was quite expensive and typically mixed into punch water to bring down it's concentration. Mass production and lowering costs were what triggered the alcoholism epidemic and temperance movements of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Drinking in northern Europe does have a way longer and more entrenched history than elsewhere though. Colonial men women and children all drank watered down rum and beer which were more hygienic than water. In China, by contrast, half of the population gets Asian flush and cannot tolerate alcohol, and there is a strong traditional culture of boiling water and drinking tea!

As a long-time tea drinker it was a shock to realize that while tea is pretty good for you, historically its biggest health contribution has been in drinking boiled (or almost boiled) water, not those catechins or l-theanine...

Oh funny. I hadn’t thought of that.

Good point, distilled beverages (gin) affordable for the poor, hit Britain like a brick in the face in the 1700s. Whiskey in the U.S.

18th century was only 7 generations ago, not "a few dozen".

My nan was born in the 1930s and I have kids. So we're already at 3 generations that have had a chance to breed. My great grandparents takes us not even back to the start of the 20th century.

Having kids at 30 is historically very late. Late teens and early 20s was much more common. So perhaps not a few dozen, but certainly over a dozen.

>To what extent alcohol was completely new etc I do not know

Kind of a tricky question that is somewhat covered in my link. Alcohol was definitely brewed in the Americas pre-Columbus, but by the seventeenth century alcohol was largely unknown to the Natives interacting with the colonists.

I always wonder how much was lost in the population crash caused by the introduction of old world diseases.

Tejuino is a precolonial alcoholic beverage that is still enjoyed today. It's ABV is incredibly low compared to anything you'd buy in a modern 7/11 however.

The tarahumara people's have more alcoholic version called tesguino that is only drunk once per year as the preparation process is labor intensive, and the drink goes bad rather quickly

I think your points add much needed nuance, but isn't there a possibility that both are true? I.e., both your examples may be true for Native Americans in present-day Mexico while the OP's point could be true for other groups like the Lakota at Pine Ridge. (I'm not claiming any knowledge on the subject, just questioning whether both points have to be mutually exclusive)

It’s false to say there isn’t data and pier reviewed studies on the subject. The link is clear.

However, there’s a lot of propaganda that will pretend otherwise.

https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh301/3-4.htm

I'm confused. Why link what you seem to consider "propaganda" showing no genetic predisposition to alcoholism rather than link the clear proof you claim exists?

Summary - and interpretation - from memory of a lot of reading:

Background: Humans are highly unusual amongst mammals; our livers are more than ten thousand times IIRC better at burning off alcohol than any other known mammal, and this is a rather recent change evolutionarily. This may have been necessary to survive off old winter fruit during the ice age that just about took us out (reduced our population down to low genetic variation.)

Alcohol, in common with all other organic solvents save water, changes every single chemical reaction within our cells at least a little bit - esp the speed and frequency of given reactions. (Hence the cancer risk, etc, etc.) The change to neurotransitter reactions is just one of those changes, but one we find pleasing and distracting. Some genes protective re alcohol consumption reduce the effects/pleasure alcohol brings. Others may reduce habituation (so dose doesn't tend to increase.) Etc. My genes adapt me so quickly to alcohol that habituation/dosage escalates FAST. I and my relatives famously just shouldn't start since alcoholism is a quick result if we keep drinking.

Cultures which have cultivated alcohol for thousands of years (Asia) are less vulnerable to alcoholism; no doubt those kinda genes were culled sometime back. Europeans less so, less protected. Central American native populations cultivated alcohol but (at least in some cultures) restricted its use to the elderly. North American natives, not to my knowlege.

Selecting strongly for alcohol resistance has costs, off course, there are always tradeoffs. And where evolutionary selection has acted very strongly over a short period of time, the tradeoffs (downsides) can be extreme (particularly from copy-number variations, which are common under heavy/fast selection.)

If you're going to be a teetotaller anyway, you'd prefer to have Native genes on average (other confounding variables aside.) But if you're going to drink - and alcohol is obviously dangerous - well, maybe you don't want the otherwise more ideal Native/original genetics; maybe some alcohol-protective genes (with other downsides) would predict a longer and better life for you, on average.

It was my understanding that native Americans have a genetically driven shortage of the second enzyme in the chain necessary for breaking down alcohol. My source was knowledgeable but not rigorous so take that as you will.

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/alcohol-metabolism

Not exactly what you’re asking but there’s also a concept of genetic trauma, where some traumas can fundamentally change your offspring.

For example, your grandmother from your moms side technically made the egg cells that you were born from. That means that whatever your grandmother was going through could for example pass on all the way down to you.

>> For example, your grandmother from your moms side technically made the egg cells that you were born from.

That can't be right. Grandma gave mom a single cell. Mom's ovaries with grandpa's DNA too produced the egg leading to me. Or is there some element I'm not aware of that make it more like stated above?

I guess the egg cell you came from was made inside your grandma when your mom was an embryo in her. So the the cell was technically made inside your grandma’s body.

isn't the mother just providing the nourishment for the fetus to grow inside her? and the fetus itself, takes the nourishment, and actually producing the eggs inside itself?

So technically I don't think we can say the grandma is making the eggs directly, but has assisted in the fetus' creation, and then provided the nutrients/environment for the egg creation that the fetus itself makes (which yes, can influence things w/ the generational trauma science coming out...).

mom and dad also supply a half helix [single strand] of DNA, with conservation of state.

this passes on the structural features responsible for regulatory configuration

epigenetic modulation of penetrance, and/or heritability.

environment causes biochemical changes of the state of the DNA. methylation is a common phenomenon.

also, vertical transmission of DNA state facilitating transcription factor modulation of constituative expression. this one is a complex concept but is also a common example.

sums up to, physical state of DNA can be transferred and conserved, during replication.

Look into epigenetic inheritance. This is a mechanism by which environmental factors cause inheritable modulation of genes, which themselves are unchanged. Methylation (attachment of methyl groups) of DNA is one such mechanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_i...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-018-0113-y

Yeah but it has absolutely no explanatory power for sociological phenomenon. People want it to be true, but there's just no there there.

https://razib.substack.com/p/you-cant-take-it-with-you-strai...

Thanks for this link, it's an interesting and informative post. Gives me an additional PoV to consider.

> Yeah but it has absolutely no explanatory power for sociological phenomenon

That's a nice broad generality, but it doesn’t seem to be true. For instance, on the specific subject of thw thread, epigenetic changes related to chronic stress have demonstrated to have evidence of both (1) some intergenerational transmissibility, and (2) a role in alcoholism.

It this stage inherited “genetic trauma” is a fringe scientific theory.

Epigenetics is not fringe science - you inherit the methylation patterns from your parents' genes. Two people with the same genes can (in principle) have very different methylation patterns & thus differences in gene expression that result in changes in behaviour.

None of this is controversial.

That’s about parent’s environmental exposure affecting gene expression in their children. The notion that this can be passed down over multiple generations, where the parent’s generation wasn’t directly exposed to the environmental conditions, is fringe.

Its not “fringe”, it is demonstrated as a thing which occurs.

Some particular multigenerational effects may be controversial, speculative, or even fringe, but that multigenerational epigenetic effects exist is not at all fringe.

Confidently asserting that there is a generalized “concept of genetic trauma” that explains behavioral phenomena, as the poster did above, is not correct. The science on this is extremely limited: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenet.... And it gets invoked by non-experts to support a lot of fringe assertions.

> genetic-exacerbated substance abuse

>Could you expand on this a bit? Not a concept I am familiar with

Its profitable to pretend that personal choices have nothing to do with drug addiction. Then you can "treat" them forever collecting a monthly check from the government. I say this having grown up in a drug house and leaving as a 16yo teenager with nothing. I already regret this comment not because it isn't true but people detached from reality are going to get all bent out of shape.

I know what you mean. Unfortunately, I can only give your comment a single upvote

> Its profitable to pretend that personal choices have nothing to do with drug addiction

That is true, and there are systemic issues we should fix.

However it is also true that some people will latch on to anything — “personal choices”, “systemic issues” — to justify callousness and lack of compassion. It’s an ugly way to live, always looking for some justification to spit on those who are in already in trouble.

Not the OP, but I think a larger factor here is fetal alcohol exposure, not epigenetics.

populations differ in how well they can handle booze. this has been known since Roman times; various authors wrote how the Germans were more prone to alcoholism than Latins, an ethnic difference that persists to this day.

native americans have it particularly bad, and have for centuries. colonist traders exploited it for profit, missionaries tried to stamp it out, Indian leaders often campaigned to keep rum out of their territories, etc.

There are definitely some social/environmental factors but there's enough anecdotal smoke around a genetic predisposition in some populations that the search for fire and causation is underway.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9603607/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30852706/

Also, Pine Ridge is literally the poorest location in America and the only way out of the poverty is to leave, which means leaving behind your family, your tribe, and your culture.

There's like 25 businesses there for a population of thousands. There's no good reason for people to drive through the reservation, a few handfuls of trucks, and the land isn't good for much other than to look at or feed some cows.

The real story here seems to me to be not that people burned their clothes to stay warm but that people in a place with fragile connections to the outside world had so little in the way of supplies to weather a relatively short period without food deliveries. I'm not blaming them, I assume that many of the affected people don't have the resources to keep a buffer stock.

The real story of every tragedy that hits a reservation is that they all sit downstream of a horrific, orchestrated genocide campaign intended to destroy these people’s history, culture, and knowledge of self-sufficiency.

Put ‘em on the shittiest plots of land you can find, steal their children, ban them from speaking their languages and from passing their knowledge between generations, then we can sit and gawk at their 100% intentional and designed cultural death spiral.

Not to say that indigenous life was some suffering-free utopia, but it’s worth remembering their plight is not some emergent accident.

A nice cop out. Are you saying those on the reserves are generationally crippled beyond reproach? Are all cultures stuck in wintery conditions facing the same issues and if not, why?

Hmmm, nope? I’m saying that these particular people had very particular things done to them intended to yield exactly these particular outcomes.

Even though it's not technically wrong, but I also don't see how viewing a people (or worse, viewing yourself) as a perpetual victim is in any way useful. There's no rewriting the past. Saying "I'll never amount to anything because of what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago" denies your agency, and thus a fundamental aspect of your humanity.

Some people seem to think that the bigotry of low expectations is "social justice".

No, my argument is that this is ongoing.

The moment something of value is found on native land, even today, it’s taken from them.

Put someone in a village 100 miles from the nearest town, deny them the basic infrastructure you provide for everyone else, deny them proper education, skimp on government job programs provided to other struggling towns that would eventually lead to wealth flowing in and free enterprise, and let this wealth divide grow for decades and you’ll see you’ve successfully made a hole to trap people in.

It’s not bigotry. Even if you want to ignore the centuries of active destruction of their families, the infrastructure gap is huge. Take a look at, say, the difference between Japan and Vietnam. Both got absolutely leveled by the US. One of them had infrastructure rebuilt by the US and investment in local enterprise by the US government. One is a rich country. One is a very poor country that’s only recently rising up… because other people are coming in and helping build infrastructure and providing jobs for a people who were crushed and isolated from the world for decades.

There’s a wealth and basic life standard gap that is impossible to bootstrap. Any successful place built from “nothing” got there through getting outside investment in some form, or through centuries of time left to grow through their own means. Plus their lands continue to be exploited. When oil or water or something is used by an outside company, instead of letting them have it and enriching the people on the land, eminent domain is exercised or companies buy it from the gov for pennies.

The point isn't "are they poor?" or "why are they poor?" but "how do you lift a community out of poverty?".

There are many poor communities across the country, in all races and creeds. The past can't be rewritten- focusing on "you are poor because X happened in the past" is just telling someone there is no reason for hope.

The way out involves both external and internal forces; external in the sense of support for development of infrastructure and economic activity, internal in the sense of a willingness and belief of capability of change. Many tribes who have successful casinos don't see significant improvements depending on their payout structure, because simply giving money to people with no financial literacy is a recipe for loss.

This is true for all communities facing poverty.

Also because a casino isn’t infrastructure. A casino is the equivalent of building liquor stores and calling it a job well done. Amidst a thriving economy it’s fine. Otherwise it’s making a few wealthy at the cost of community health.

Casinos are a way tribes found to generate wealth as an exception to state laws. It’s one of the very few possible “true” bootstrapping examples. But no healthy community is dominated by casinos.

> There’s a wealth and basic life standard gap that is impossible to bootstrap.

USA southern border is over-run with poor people trying to get in. I wonder what is different for these folks?

I’ve just explained what’s different. A successful genocide campaign carried out over centuries that has slowed but not stopped and certainly not reversed course.

Many of those crossing illegally are also descendants of repressed peoples, either African and / or already native at the time of Spanish settlement. They come from communities facing brutal repression, either at the hands of government military or drug cartels.

You seem to view the world as if any of these problems are unique to America.

Well yes, the problem of being targeted by a centuries-long genocide campaign carried out by and within the borders of the wealthiest and most advanced nation on earth is, in fact, unique to American indigenous peoples.

I'm not saying "bad things only happen to native Americans." I'm saying "the American campaign of genocide against native Americans only happened to native Americans."

At this point you seem to be willfully ignoring the numerous modern day examples of injustices perpetrated on these people. This is not some long-gone history. As mentioned in other threads, governments kidnapped native children as recently as the 1970s. They showed up to houses, stole children, shipped those children to boarding schools to be raped, tortured, and killed en masse - optimistically to be brainwashed out of their culture. Governments are continuing to wrestle natural resources from tribes as recently as today. Right now. Across the entire country.

While Vietnam is a poor country, the quality of life for those who make $200/month is still good. It doesn't have the overtime or societal issues that Japan has. Vietnam has a better trajectory for its population count and does not face stagnation. What's the point of being a rich country if your people are broken inside?

I know you're saying that countries can't develop themselves without external support, but I'm not convinced that a richer country = better quality of life for people which is an assumption you made.

Vietnam very much has overtime issues. Americans work more hours than Japanese. Many Viets work 6 days a week at typical office jobs which is more than both countries. Vietnam is currently rapidly trending to under replacement-level births.

I chose those examples because I’ve worked in each, but hours worked and birth rates really aren’t too relevant here. Vietnam was a nice country, but be honest: you wouldn’t want to live there making an average wage if you had a choice of living in a typical US or Japanese town with decent infrastructure and average wages.

The trapped individuals are living are living in a location where these sorts of conditions are extreme. Prior to climate change they may have been unthinkable.

People with limited resources don't devote them to mitigating once in a lifetime risks. Their everyday life is constrained: buy a more reliable car vs. save for a child's education. Eat healthier food vs. visit the doctor.

These Native Americans live in a vulnerable location that provides little land-based wealth, isolates them from population centers & thus opportunity, and exposes them to environmental threat.

If you can't see how that impacts their opportunity to "amount to anything," I suggest relocating. Become their neighbors and report back in 10 years whether you think this had any deleterious impact on what your career has amounted to.

> Prior to climate change

Now climate change in winter makes wheel loaders not function properly and people are too cold?

The first paragraph is absolute nonsense. This storm is an outlier, for sure, but winters have on average been getting easier, not harder, in the upper Midwest.

Pine Ridge has unemployment of 80-90%, median income of $4000/year, and life expectancy of ~50 years. Many people live without electricity or running water.

I don't know that people who live there say "I'll never amount to anything", I don't think any of us participating in this conversation live there; probably none of us are natives. So we're not talking about what they say about themselves, we're talking about what we say about them.

If not the legacy of expropriation, displacement, and cultural destruction... the usual explanation is that there is just something wrong with these people as people, something diseased, pathological with their culture. I don't see how that is in any way useful, or somehow more respectful of "agency".

Up until the 70s, children (children!) were still being forcibly sent to prison-like (for real, prison-like) boarding schools.

https://archleague.org/article/cheyenne-river-reservation-bo...

I don't think there is anything wrong with Oglala culture -- I think they have the cultural and personal resources they need to thrive if conditions are changed to make up for generations of intentional targetted destruction of their material resources and cultural life and social networks. "Social justice" would be restoration of sovreignty, reparations (a massive "marshall plan" level of physical and human infrastructure investment), an apology and general cultural recognition and education throughout the USA of native history, legal enforcement of treaty rights that have been ignored/thrown out, etc.

While it's a situation with great differences as well as similarities, New Zealand's reparative policies toward the Maori can provide some models. https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/79224-new-zealand-leads-way-r...

Blaming the Oglala Lakota people for the result of generations of targeted destruction of their way of life and ability to survive is not somehow more respectful of their "agency" or dignity.

Like, what are we actually talking about here right now? The lack of capacity of people on the Pine Ridge reservation to handle a weather emergency? How is it more respectful of agency or dignity to say we shouldn't talk about how this is the result of generations of colonialism, that intentionally removed the material and cultural resources people would use to take care of themselves? Is it more respectful of agency or dignity to suggest that they are the poorest community in the USA because of their own cultural failings? I agree that liberals as well as right-wingers can pathologize native culture, suggest that their culture is broken and needs to be "fixed", that the problem is internal -- I think suggesting that there is something wrong with native culture is what is disrespectful of their actual dignity, agency, and continued ability to survive under conditions designed for the opposite. They are very strong people, the evidence is that they are still there, and I hope they think of themselves thusly.

My girlfriend's mom went to a boarding school. The abuse she experienced as a kid still affects her and her family.

> Are all cultures stuck in wintery conditions facing the same issues and if not, why?

The person you're replying to explained why: We did it to them on purpose to wipe them out.

> We did it to them on purpose to wipe them out.

"we"? I wouldn't be so presumptuous.

You did not. The society that you are a part of did systematically disassemble their society and slaughter any resistance.

So “we” got our trains, oil and highways, and turned the Great Plains into one of the great breadbaskets of the world, at least for awhile. Unfortunately the depletion of the aquifers will leave those same plains a desert from an agricultural perspective in many of our lifetimes. Maybe when that land is worthless to society again the Sioux will get it back.

Once again, you’re making a lot of assumptions about the person you’re replying to.

That or you're just choosing to unfavorably read the word "we" as if it refers to you specifically, instead of to the poster and their cultural, racial or national group, in order to avoid engaging with the substance of their post?

They are people warehoused in obscure rural areas with subsistence support.

They get enough to live not enough to thrive. The federal government provided healthcare, for example, but funds it in such a way that they run out of operating funds in month 10 or 11 of the annual budget.

Like most people in this sort situation, the malaise takes over. Alcohol and drug abuse is rampant. Opportunity is nil. Breaking out of the cycle is very difficult and requires an individual to have the right combination of luck, street smarts, ability and ability to walk away that is hard to find.

More like everyone who can escape does; this obviously only leaves those who cannot escape.

Yes, why aren't these people self sufficient after we took away all their means of self sufficiency? It's a real big mystery isn't it.

>Yes, why aren't these people self sufficient after we took away all their means of self sufficiency?

This sounds very much like "racism of low expectations". "These people" are just as self-sufficient as any other group of modern people of similar socioeconomic background. It's been 100+ years since they were mistreated in any serious fashion.

I come from eastern Europe and 150 years ago most of my ancestors were serfs, only a rung or two above chattel slaves on the ladder of human condition. If someone seriously suggested that well, what do you expect of these poor chaps, serfdom and all, I think I'd get quite upset.

Just food for thought about how both your phrasing and implications of what you're saying might seem to people who aren't from your background.

This is exactly it. Many peoples suffered extremely bad histories (Jews, Armenians, Chinese under Communism etc) and rise to overcome it in modern day.

History is not fair but your actions yesterday determine your life today and your actions today determine your future. It is extremely damaging to sustain this culture of of course your life is shit because of what happened hundreds of years ago, nothing you can do

"100 years ago" is a weird way to describe "ongoing harm as recently as... earlier this year."

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/18/1081872135/native-americans-p...

Or the US government's uranium mining on Navajo land continuing to poison people today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_...

What does mine placement have to do with a community's ability to store emergency firewood where it's accessible in an emergency?

The same genocidal policies that enable resource extraction with complete disregard for local populations are the ones responsible (intentionally) for the abject poverty that renders these populations extremely vulnerable to weather events. Most Americans cannot comprehend that this level of poverty exists within their borders.

For example, these populations have to be spread across massive ranges of completely worthless land, making infrastructure extremely inefficient even in scenarios where they have the financial means to invest in it whatsoever (which is also rare for all the same reasons^)

Well, that example was about a Navajo community. Quite a long way from the Pine Ridge rez. Very different people and culture.

They gave that as an example in response to the claim that the abuse of natives is historical and not actively happening. While it is not directly damage done to the occupants of Pine Ridge, it does demonstrate that the sort of injustices that destroy native communities are still occurring.

Or what you're comparing is a largely successful genocide (American natives) to either a non-genocide (yeah history was mostly poverty-stricken) or unsuccessful genocides (various groups in Europe).

I really suggest you watch this video: https://youtu.be/A5P6vJs1jmY

You cannot really compare the successful genocide natives in NA to being poor in Europe.

I come from eastern Europe and 150 years ago most of my ancestors were serfs, only a rung or two above chattel slaves on the ladder of human condition.

50 years ago a lot of their descendants in the Eastern Bloc countries were probably still in that condition or in the USSR factory worker equivalent.

Lol you should learn a bit about the history of these countries. 50 years ago was the seventies. While not as confortable as in the west, its was far to be at the level of serfs.

The original quoted statement in GP is a pretty common thing I have seen in younger people in now-prosperous former-communist central/eastern European countries. Minorities being subject to institutional racism in the form of apartheid, redlining and such is completely handwaved away and countered with "we had it bad under communism, but we recovered so why can't they". There are thankfully a growing number who don't think like this, but many simply cannot be convinced and will dismiss your explanations as excuse-making, or try-hard "woke"-ness. Hell, I've even encountered guys here insisting that because they're so non-racist they can use the n-word.

I think that many just don't know how widespread, deeply ingrained and recent much of this was - they think there was slavery, a bit of racism hanging around and then (in the USA at least) the civil rights act sorted things out and made everything equal. And that's really similar in nature to the comment you replied to - people have picked up a simplified and wrong version of history of Warsaw Pact countries and they're just a bit ignorant of the truth.

Yes, learn a bit about the history.

In the USSR, peasants were essentially serfs. They only got internal passports in the 1960s and 1970s, and without those they could not leave the village without permission. They worked for a state collective farm, most of their pay came in just counting the "labour-days" they contributed - a totally self-containbed, essentially prison-like economic system.

So yes, I agree, I originally brought up serfs as being something from 150 years ago, but it was more like 50-60 years ago.

It's true that university-educated intellectuals who have fled Eastern Europe after communism ended have, as a social class, done fairly well for themselves, but have you ever visited the... Less cosmopolitan parts of the former USSR?

It's not quite life-on-the-reservation out there, but it's not far from it.

They were never any good, and as soon as the planned economy stopped pouring money and work/busy-work into those areas, they all went straight to shit.

There’s a very real difference between mostly everyone being serfs long ago, and a relatively small, particular group being targeted by government sponsored economic/cultural/physical violence in your lifetime.

I live in Denver, with a very large Native population, and many still remember being taken from their families and being forced to speak English, while the rest of the country experience the affluence boom of the suburbs and such. Acknowledging that recent history isn’t controversial in those communities.

> It's been 100+ years since they were mistreated in any serious fashion

This is just patently untrue. Land is still being stolen, programs to help Indigenous people are still being cut. I dont think people realize how close our history actually is. There were still nearly 10,000 children in Native American residential schools as of 2007. The height of them ended in the 70s, which is barely 50 years away. Thats quite literally the parents of modern day teenagers and young adults.

These schools have absolutely decimated the population and culture of indigenous people.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schoo....

> It's been 100+ years since they were mistreated in any serious fashion.

The last residential school (Where native children would be kidnapped into, to have the Indian, quite literally, beaten out of them) in Canada closed in 1998.

Yes, but this is very simplistic, since it's insinuating that the beatings for Native languages and other horrific mistreatment took place in 1998, whereas in fact that's not close to true, the worst evils of what we associate with Residential Schools ended many decades before the 1990s, mostly before WW2. Doesn't make them good or right, forcing kids into boarding schools based on their cultural background is very wrong even if there are no beatings or malnutrition.

This this this this this this this this. ZERO coincidence that this tragedy happens on a reservation.

I honestly wonder if the native Americans were (destined to be) screwed even before Europeans set foot in Americas. They were behind a formidable technology curve and I truly wonder would they have fared better if Japanese or Russian (or possibly even Chinese) colonists (the closest geographic candidate colonists) showed up.

Consider it as a thought experiment - something that's been popping in my head lately:

under what sort of ideal conditions would have the native civilizations and peoples of Americas been left unmolested by anyone? An entire continent left in isolation while the more technologically advanced societies reached the way station of 'universal human rights'?

[typically don't mention downvotes but a difficult question does not merit it. If you so strongly disagree, discuss it.]

If migration from Europe (and I suppose Africa) hadn't been unrelenting, then the natives would have gradually built up a modern-ish, defendable civilization. Maybe. It would have required some centralization of government as well, to prevent the divide-and-conquer tactics used against them.

Right, the question is precisely this: who would leave the juicy morsel of Americas on the table in the 15th-20th century historic range. The means and processes may possibly vary.

Just to be clear, even today in 21st you will note there are many global actors that deny the very notion of a "universal human rights". I'm not European myself and definitely not defending what happened. But it seems to me that what happened is an (inevitable) accident of history: two worlds that evolved in effective isolation for thousands of years. And I wonder: which of the relatively advanced societies would have left them in peace so they could catch up and integrate as you propose?

What happened to natives in America was anything but an accident https://youtu.be/A5P6vJs1jmY

I think you are not aware of the way the word “accident” is used here, or you are using its misinterpretation as a jumping off point.

Is that serious? Behind the technology curve is a massive understatement. They were thousands of years behind in nearly every area of development.

I wonder if the massive riches of nature they had for a low amount of people played a role in this

I think Yuval Noah Harari would agree with you. You may find his book Sapiens of interest.

The point you raise touches directly on the essence of my original comment (which should have been clearer):

When we think of the value-system matrix of the 3 co-evolving continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia, the core commonality that is specially distinct from the value-system matrix that evolved in Americas is in regards to notions of property and nature 'husbandry'.

Any vanguard explorers from the Eurasian civilisational matrix would bring with them the entirely alien notions of property and systemic cultivation of nature, and that would inevitably result in a confrontation of value systems, in which the technologically superior side would dominate.

The Russians did explore Alaska and interact with natives, but all they did was set up some missionary and trade posts. China explored Africa and then became isolationist. Japan was always isolationist until forced to open up by the US.

And not just Alaska, but California as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_colonization_of_North_...

Russians had to pass through the Caucausus and Steppes before they reached Alaska.

https://www.international.ucla.edu/apc/centralasia/article/1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuban_Nogai_Uprising

https://fountainmagazine.com/1993/issue-2-april-june-1993/th...

(The Chinese are in the clear imo, so I parenthesized them.)

"their languages" were recognized as unique and useful in 1950s. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/american-indi...

From the article, the community has stockpiled resources, but their plows and skidsteers are all out of commission. They literally cannot get to the firewood, and every time they clear some snow out more blows in.

Some people have been completely isolated in their homes for 8 days. I'd say most people, even in rural areas, don't have a supply that'll last longer than that, except for some hardcore preppers.

How's the winter in that area normally ?

Because i've lived my first ~16 years of life in a home heated with firewood (and coal but it's irellevant now) and by the end of september all the fuel needed for 3 months of winter was neatly piled up within easy reach of the house. All you needed was to shovel like 20 meters of path and maybe a wheelbarrow.

Why would you need something motorized to get to your firewood? Doesn't make sense unless they've never had heavy winters before.

I don't know the details, but they are very very poor (Pine Ridge is often calculated to have the highest unemployment and lowest per capita income in the entire country; life expectancy is ~50 years), and I'm not sure how forrested the land is, it's mostly grassland/prairie.

The OP article suggested that many people ordinarily use propane heat, which normally can be delivered just fine. I don't know enough to say why not firewood, but I'd guess expense and convenience. Aha, this other article mentions a firewood shortage, but doesn't say details:

> In homes heated by firewood, there is another battle. Yellow Hair says there is a firewood shortage happening on the reservation, but communities are coming together to help one another. “Lending that helping hand, when they can and where they can,” said Yellow Hair. Keeping people warm is an issue across much of the Pine Ridge Reservation, with a firewood shortage and propane trucks jelling up from the cold.

—https://www.blackhillsfox.com/2022/12/22/one-natural-phenome...

And here's an article about life in Pine Ridge generally:

> Among the most impoverished of these reservations, Pine Ridge is plagued by an 80 to 90 percent unemployment rate with a median individual income of $4,000 a year, according to the Re-Member nonprofit organisation’s 2007 statistics.

— https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/11/2/life-on-the-pin...

Thank you for the context. It’s a little cringey to read all of the comparatively wealthy and privileged comments that boil down to “why didn’t they just spend lots of money on equipment and supplies.”

Another question is why they all still live there?

It’s a reservation and they’re the natives there. And the average is quite young, so I think everyone who can escape does (which can harm the remainder in other ways).

I spent time in ND, SD and MN matching online and phone wagering with receptive reservations. IMHO if you want to escape the res you gotta go far far away. Think 1000 miles. The racism in the Midwest is so entrenched that they solved the who!e uncomfortable mingling with people you hate thing by COMPLETELY excluding natives from society. The amount of times I saw natives bounced just for walking in to a bar in Fargo was disgusting. Its just assumed by race they are drunk, poor, vagrant and violent.

This also happens in Montana and around Four Corners, wherever there are reservations and non-native Americans mingling. The old bias against drunken Indians rears its head. Local characterizations propagate the narrative that the reservation is full of lazy drunks, dopeheads, or abusive and combative individuals.

I was able to work with members of the Ute and Navajo tribes in Four Corners years ago when our company worked on reservation lands and was required to hire a percentage of local laborers. Those guys worked as hard as the rest of us out in the July sun down in the hot canyons. They laughed at and with each other poking jibes at each other since their tribes were traditionally not allies. It was all good-natured ribbing and I'm sure they knew each other or of each other before working with us. They worked the length of our contract in the area and had few issues with attendance or effort.

Local whites always talked down about the natives but I found them to be as dependable as Mexican and central American immigrants (legal or otherwise) that I worked with in Texas and other states. These people needed jobs and were willing to work to keep a job and the quality of their efforts was on par or better than the quality of local labor.

In contrast, our company cycled through local non-native help. Many of those people appeared and worked long enough to earn a paycheck and then disappeared. Some even played the employment game where a group of friends hired out to each of the three non-local companies and on any given day your rolls would show all of them working with one of your crews, some of them with one of your crews, or none of them with your crews that day. They went where they thought the best pay opportunity of the day would be and had a friend sign them in where they were expected to be so they could earn a check there too. This went on for weeks until one of our crews had a problem in the field and in the process of sorting it out and looking for a scapegoat, they went through the rolls of potential crew members who should have had responsibility and discovered that several people listed as being present and working did not show up at all.

Since the three companies were in the same business and everyone knew everyone else our party manager had a talk with the other guys and they compared employee rolls and discovered all the overlap and the system of sign-ins. All of those people were fired immediately when they showed up for their next day's work. These were ordinary white guys who all lived in that area.

For the same reason they cannot stockpile.

Moving is very expensive. Then how can they afford rent in a more expensive area? How will they find jobs?

We even have the first Gen Z Congressperson being rejected from housing due to low credit score, despite the fact that his salary as a future Congressperson is a known six-figure value.

Once society has deemed you too poor to be useful, it is hard to escape that designation even if you make it out.

Your salary has very little to do with your credit score.

Length of history + history of repayment.

Of course, but also it is a little ridiculous that someone with $170k+ salary is totally unable to rent at most places due to automatic credit score rejection, despite pretty much everything being below the rule of thumb for rent and salary.

I have a relative who has generally been in and out of debt. Occasionally, she convinces someone in the family to give her a cash infusion - enough to clear the debts.

She goes back into debt right after.

In her youth, she didn't make much. She has since become a skilled professional though and now makes a very good salary.

She is still in debt.

I have friends who make mind boggling amounts of money and also have amazing debt. As they have made more their debt has gotten worse, not better.

A credit score says whether or not you have paid back your debts. Making more money does not fix the broken behavior - it often times makes it worse.

At the same time, being unable to rent an apartment in DC as a Congressperson effectively cuts out people who were, or are of, a certain income strata from ever serving as representatives and Senators. Is that actually desirable?

No. They can commute from Maryland or Virginia like everyone else.

Biden, when he was VP under Obama, commuted back and forth to Delaware on the weekends still.

Those states, and pretty much every state, also have apartments that run credit score checks.

Yes, and you can still get housing with a bad credit score, you will just be getting less expensive housing.

Doesn't credit score also incorporate depth of payment (not sure if that's the term, but a history of paying back a large debt)? A financial adviser once told me, when I was three years out of university and had finished paying off my student loans, that my credit score was good (I'd paid off minimal bills ontime on credit cards for years and paid off a used car and student loans) but not deep - I'd never taken on a mortgage or any other high five-digit or six-digit debts.

So, though I'd been responsible for a long time, it didn't count like it would have if I'd engaged in a lot more borrowing. Problem was, I valued being debt-free sooner for the flexibility it gave me.

After all, look at the etymology of mortgage - mort gage (old French), literally "death pledge". Thanks, but I prefer life without that kind of constraint.

And if one is born into generational poverty, in a place highly dependent on government intervention, its probably really hard to access the mindset and opportunities for education and entrepreneurial examples that could start to break the poverty trend.

You are correct that history of repayment helps the score. Someone who borrows $5 once and pays it back once is less trustworthy (from a credit sense) then the person who borrows $5 every month and pays it back every month, as odd as that feels in the abstract.

Credit scores are intentionally a blend of elements. Generally the advice is to make one or two small credit purchases a month and pay them back - just enough to show consistent mild activity. Some people like using gas for this since credit cards are more fraud protected, but that may or may not be a "small purchase" for you.

When we talk about poverty, we want to seperate out the individual case (Bob is broke) from the group case (Mary's tribe is broke.) Fixing Bob's problems looks very different from fixing the tribes problems. (That doesn't mean the root problem is unrelated.)

Financial literacy education is unfortunately overrun with scams.

If someone doesn’t have the money to stock pile some food and fuel do you think they can afford to move?

Bus fare, then a homeless shelter until you find work in your new city?

Are you seriously advising them to leave their home to become homeless in a place they know nobody ?

So fight for space in a homeless shelter. Get robbed the days you find a bed. Get robbed or stripped of everything by the cops the days you don't and have to sleep outside. I've never been in the situation, but accounts from people who've survived it are a search away.

It's that easy folks!

Where do you want them to go? Rapid? Chadron? Scottsbluff? These aren't places with a ton of resources either. It's not like they can just pick up and go be homeless somewhere with good services at the cost of bus fare.

Places won’t employ you without an address. Homes won’t be rent to you without a job.

I can answer this as a dude that started off life at 11 homeless and went from there. Live in unquestionable poverty along with your support network of $4000 a year earners? Or take a bus to any random American city and get ready for your how many days can a green recruit last in Nam scenario?

>green recruit last in Nam scenario

How is it any different where you came from? Once you become a teenager the gangs and predatory "adults" start closing in on you to either join/serve or be an outsider they abuse for amusement.

I say this from similar situation as you but I was 16. Much easier since I could legally work in restaurants (which is what I did). I have no idea how you would make it without the ability to work. I'm not saying that I want anyone to go through what I or you did. However it was blindingly clear to me even as a child that staying was equal to dying. I don't see how these people stay in these places having been there myself.

Someone posted the average income at pine ridge is <$4k. You can work for minimum wage for almost a 400% increase in income by leaving.

Where are they going to go where they won't be at a severe disadvantage due to racism and lack of both money and connections?

Yes they’d be at a disadvantage. Wouldn’t you still make that choice? Why would you voluntarily stay in a place so poor? Can it really get any worse?

Anywhere else. You make it sound like racism is bad enough to keep them unemployed

> Where are they going to go where they won't be at a severe disadvantage due to racism and lack of both money and connections?

Mexico. This people needs the wisdom of a Mexican coacher.

Thriving despite racism, lack of money and no friends in town, but with a golden, fully legal document of citizenship granting free pass, and speaking the same language as everybody else?. Yep, Challenge accepted

I think the problem gets much more complex, and I would assume that moving from pine ridge (and similar places) - one would find that their rent increases more than 400%. I am assuming that living there grants access to transportation in some regard, as well as community mentors that help with how to live and what can be done when something tragic happens. Moving is more than the cost in dollars to get from point A to point B - and living somewhere in the states could yield a worse life for people even if they suddenly increased income by 400%. Last report I saw listed 8 counties (?) where you could pay rent on minimum wage (?) - I think it was a few in New Mexico and western Oregon - not sure this is still true - but you may need more than a job and rent if moving to these places - cars and other things may be necessary. I also don't know how many people could move to these last few places before all the available housing was taken and prices go up, and all the basic jobs are taken and people start working under the table for less, bringing the average wage down. The shortage of housing in this country is crushing so many, and that's without the other tough things being considered.

What about doing the opposite and going back to how they lived years ago, hunting and fishing, traditional housing.

I'm guessing however that the reservation was put in the most disadvantaged place for doing such traditional activities. A prarie is useless without it's bison. And bison are probably a protected species.

Many would call that poverty or subsistence but many long for it. It may be romanticised but it seems like the essence of life. Heimo Korth (?) In Alaska been doing it for 40 odd years.

I guess you don’t understand how things work outside of your circle. They’re not software engineers on ridiculous salaries. Lots of people live day to day, not knowing where their next meal is coming from, never mind prepping a huge stockpile for storm events, or being able to spend thousands moving elsewhere & being able to afford said move/rent elsewhere/get work etc.

People’s biggest problems are mostly not how to pass a FAANG interview.

imagine a ghetto but instead of being in a major city like Venice it is 1000s of miles away from any real economic opportunity.

Thousands of miles? Check a map.

I grew up in North Dakota (where there are a number of reservations) and worked on a project in a First Nations village in Ontario. Comments here exhibit zero awareness of what crushing poverty (and reservation dynamics) can do to people. Or, for that matter, what enormous privilege and lucky circumstances can do to people.

>All you needed was to shovel like 20 meters of path and maybe a wheelbarrow.

According to the article some of the areas are getting 30 inches of snow and ice!

With drifts easily doubling that, I could see how 20 meters could quickly become near impossible to clear by hand, especially while it's still coming down.

Snow drifts can go 20 feet or higher with no place to shovel the snow to

Could they dig or melt a tunnel to the wood? If the snow were melted and then refroze as ice at the bottom of the tunnel, one could then slid the wood back to the tunnel entrance...

Hardship breeds creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention (except under excessive government intervention, which may be at the root of reservation problems).

Maybe if we could calculate the present day market value of all the land the US government stole from the Native Americans (I've heard we broke nearly every treaty we signed with the Native Americans... to our shame), that could be structural payments to encourage entrepreneurial activity on the reservation

This idea sounds like literal murder.

The odds of the snow caving in and being buried alive are far greater than the risks of waiting to get plowed out.

How much experience do you have in -30F with meters of accumulated snow? How much experience do you have digging tunnels? Because your comment reads like a literal Loony Toons episode, and I've never experienced below -10F or more than a meter of snow.

Sounds like bad idea. But assuming you have no choice and need to leave your house you still need to put the snow somewhere that you are digging out. Are you going to fill up your house with it?

Also I'm not sure that every household has someone able-bodied enough to do that work.

Exactly. Nobody is going to be able to shovel that out by hand in that extreme cold. It was -30 with the wind here a couple days ago and it took my forever to shovel out the driveway because I had to frequently stop and go back inside to warm up. And that was just a small driveway with a few inches.

The article mentions drifts as tall as houses. Even if you could get a shovel or snowblower under that, where do you put the snow? That's a ton of work!

That matches my experience. We'd typically have enough for the winter stacked at the edge of the woods behind the house, but maybe 1-2 weeks worth actually on the porch under cover to ensure it was dry by the time it was needed.

(This was back in the late 70s to very early 80s, on account of fuel costs, inflation, etc.)

This comment is peak HN contrarianism.

“How come they didn’t prepare better for a brutal winter”

Is the new “Dropbox will never work”

I suspect that most HN commentators do NOT know exactly how close to starvation and freezing and death they are (you can sit down and calculate it based on which assumptions could fail) but in the places where it gets cold you may be days or less if power fails. If your furnace can’t run without electricity how long does your house stay habitable? What backup heat do you have? If the gas lines are flowing you might be able to use a stove for awhile, or the water heater (both are often firable without electricity) - but how long will your food and water last?

I really love your comment because it helps reframe the requirements gathering and solutioning process (as well as the constraints you're operating within) for an audience that, under the right circumstances, can effectively direct their engineering experience and knowledge to solve real world problems.

Yeah it’s actually kind of “fun” in a way. What will fail first? Ok let’s mitigate that. What now fails first? Can we mitigate that without ruining the first fix? It’s like a survival Gantt chart!

I too appreciate your comment. Most folks here are probably less prepared than those in these rural reservations. NYC area has begun warning about blackouts to conserve power. They don't even have a fireplace or woodstove to burn clothes in.

You only have to look at that Texas cold snap a few years back to see how many people were forced to overnight in idling cars.

Same, upstate NY as a teenager. A couple cords stacked a few yards from the house, enough for the entire year. One problem we would never have is heat, except that if the power went out then some rooms would go cold with no way to run fans to move the air around. But no one would freeze because most of the house could be like a dry sauna.

I think in this case it must be more about a level of poverty so extreme they can't even pull together the years supply ahead of time, even if the community as a whole does have it all ready.

Maybe they don't distribute it except it tiny amounts for some reason? Maybe it gets stolen or sold?

I mean I can only assume that there is some reason they can't do the sensible thing. I couldn't imagine risking relying on daily or weekly deliveries of tiny armloads of wood. I can only assume anyone doing that has no choice or at least thinks they have no choice. I'm sure there are a few individuals who are just, let's say thoughtless, because there are always some, I'm not counting those.

The skid steers comments were about an organisation which stores and delivers wood to residents in the area. Individual households / residences presumably aren't using skid steers to retrieve wood.

From the article:

Oglala-based service organization Re-Member provides firewood to families on all corners of the reservation, but the drifts of snow have rendered their wood stockpile inaccessible still – and it’ll be that way for the foreseeable future.

“Our wood pile remains inaccessible,” read a Facebook post on Dec. 20. “Our skid steer and plow are out-of-service. Given the conditions, it would be near impossible to operate our equipment and unsafe for our staff to work in the conditions we are facing.

That is, one of the key stockpiles serving the community couldn't provide fuelwood due to both weather conditions and broken equipment.

And, as numerous others have noted, the region is desperately poor and remote.

Most people in rural areas have some kind of food store with canned goods. With things like Soylent and Huel, those can also be used. I had 6 months of Soylent back in the day. 2 bags of Huel can last about 6 days and fits in a small bag — it is one of my hacks for backpacking.

If you haven’t already, I recommend having a supply of canned beans, canned tuna, canned meats to preference, canned sardines, bulk rice (you can drop dry ice in a 5 gallon container and fill it with rice, then put silica packets on top, then seal it). With that, you can eat pretty good limited only by the duration being prepared for, and it is relatively cheap & space efficient.

For water, buy a Sawyer filter. I like the squeeze. They are capable of removing most harmful organisms out of the water, are very portable, and would help a lot during a water supply issue. They do not filter chemicals or dissolved solids. I use mine when backpacking to drink out of just about every fresh water source you can imagine, and I use it when traveling to other countries with questionable water supplies.

Also, do yourself a favor and buy a bidet seat. These will change your life. Not only is it more hygienic, it reduces the use of toilet paper significantly. In the event of disaster but water is still flowing, that is one less thing to think about.

For warmth, have the layers available. A wool base layer can keep you warm in even the coldest climates. Do not use cotton; cotton is deadly when wet in cold. Wool insulates even when wet — this is commonly known but I have actually tested it with wool socks walking around in the Virgin river in Zion National Park during the height of winter, among other places. Also would want an insulated windbreaker that can be removed as needed. Warm clothing / blankets / etc is more reliable than a fuel source for heating in my opinion, because you could get snowed in and cut off from the fuel.

These are not actions reserved for just preppers. I think everyone should have this kind of basic readiness on some level. No one in the US, for instance, has any excuse because it is all very very affordable, and also contribute positively to the environment in the case of a bidet seat.

If I was in the position most of you are in (I have opted out of the housing market for ethical reasons), I’d also be powered mostly via solar and a 3 day reserve battery for the house. Expensive, but worth it. All my heating and cooling would be electrical and I would have an inductive stovetop. Everything electrified. It is a privilege to have that kind of prep but it has a dual purpose of not hurting the environment.

When I am in the wild, I do not like to carry anything that is singular purpose. Everything must have multiple uses. This reduces waste and increases efficiency in many ways. Likewise, for disaster readiness, you need to tweak the way you live normally to be efficient during disaster. A bidet seat, for instance, is a good example. This makes your life more efficient, more comfortable, and reduces waste. Simultaneously, it functions much better during disaster.

Food storage can also be done similarly. Store things you would actually eat but preserve well. Rotate the storage by actually using it; this lets you keep track of what is still good and integrates it into your diet realistically.

Water filters can be used while hiking. Use them. Go on a hike and take a drink from your rivers or lakes. It is refreshing. If your rivers and lakes have dangerous chemicals dissolved in it because of human activity, don’t you think something should be done about that?

Aim for at least dual purpose in things. Readiness should function without the survival aspect and flow into survival without friction.

Are you suggesting the inductive stove top because it’s more energy efficient?

Thank you for sharing all of these recommendations.

Inductive fails when power fails, however. If you have a gas furnace you should consider having a gas stove connected even if you rarely use it - it can provide heat if power fails.

Remember that without power you have no exhaust fan and must ventilate appropriately.

A kerosene heater is a great investment in colder areas, hardware store sealed kerosene will last nearly forever.

No, that is only if you have a solar setup and are efficient enough for offgrid independent electricity. It is a suggestion for people with money to do a setup that doesn’t compromise on modern luxury even in disaster. Given the population here, I figured there are people who can afford that kind of setup; it would be in the range of $75,000 to do properly but do it yourself (so cost of materials).

Without that, the method for heating food I’d use is a propane stove. You can get a single burner for under $30. I always have 4, 5lbs propane canisters with me to cook while traveling. For a house, you can have a large propane tank.

> 3 day reserve battery for the house ... All my heating and cooling would be electrical

I don't think you've run the numbers here, at all. Battery storage that can provide off-grid heat-pump heating for a single dead-of-winter design night is bordering on impractical. Creating a buffer that could last 3 whole days (4-5x the size) would be blatantly prohibitive.

Batteries only make sense for daily cycling to deal with the dark. It's much less expensive and most likely less environmentally destructive to supply longer term backup electricity needs from a traditional generator and dino juice than to manufacture batteries just to have them sitting around basically unused.

The sensible way to spend capital investment is on more insulation to make your heating load quite low to begin with (eg PassivHaus). Perhaps this dovetails into your thinking, but if so you should lead with and focus on that, as talking about supplying heating loads with batteries is just insane.

edit: Also, how is it even possible to opt out of the housing market? The only ways I can think of:

1. Bundle up with warm clothing and sleep rough (moving on when needed)

2. Squat, in an unoccupied structure or even an occupied one without the knowledge of the other residents.

3. Build your own house and claim that you're at least not part of the economic market. But you would still need land to do that, which is the main problem with the housing market.

And three days is nothing when you could be without power for a week or more.

That statement was in a context of a paragraph about solar for wealthy people / upper middle class on a site with tech people who, coincidentally, near universally fall in that category.

If you have solar, you won’t ever go 3 days without some energy generation. The 3 days of battery is mainly a buffer for night time when solar is offline.

It sounds like the people in this article could be snowed in for a week or more. Your experience and insights are interesting but you're kinda tripping over your own feet with generalities that are at odds with the article we're discussing.

I agree with you. I thought replying to the post I did and honing in on the statement about rural folks was enough to go on this tangent, but I will look towards being more focused on the root topic in the future.

I just think, at the very least, getting people thinking about these topics and perhaps even convincing someone to make some lifestyle changes could be really helpful, and well, it just isn’t often words from internet strangers could have such a direct impact.

Ultimately, my thinking is that I can’t help the people in that article here, but I can try and contribute to the readers in my small way.

I’m not sure where you might be, but there are parts of the world where storms can be thick enough to get nearly no solar power for more than three days - and some systems won’t produce anything useful unless they can get above a certain point.

I have run the numbers and with proper insulation and lower sq footage it is completely practical.

That recommendation is for people with the money to do it, which is most of us here. I was replying to someone talking about most “rural” people and extended the reply to be relevant to people here.

Given I sleep most nights in a hammock in woods backpacking and travel around nonstop, and have no trouble in sub-zero wilderness, I have definitely opted out of housing and may or may not know something about what I’m talking about.

Believe it or not, people with ethics and willpower to follow through still exist. I have opted out of housing and opted out of having children, because the housing situation is unconscionable and refuse to participate in it (nor will I enrich people participating in it by paying their outrageous rates). I would never bring a child into this world as it is and where its going, so that is an easy one.

> Given I sleep most nights in a hammock in woods backpacking and travel around nonstop, and have no trouble in sub-zero wilderness, I have definitely opted out of housing

Okay, I do agree this qualifies as opting out of the housing market.

> Believe it or not, people with ethics and willpower to follow through still exist

Sure. I'm there myself on a few topics, and have lived them for quite some time. But you need to understand that this puts you at odds with 99% of society, and as such your example isn't going to be found as actionable advice by the sheer majority of people - even people who agree with you 90% of the way.

Would you mind sharing your numbers? If I just spitball with a 10kBTU/hr design load, a heat pump COP of 3, and assume that your heating requirements are entirely taken care of by that design load for 8 hours at night, that's still like 3 Powerwalls to last 3 nights. I'd say there are better ways to spend those resources, especially considering that batteries wear out like everything else.

I’d have to find my notes on the topic, but if memory serves for the results, I was targeting 200kWh of battery with a ~1000sqft space. I can’t recall my calculations on the number of panels because I was later working on another design for mobile use with my car, but I do remember it being around $20k-$30k in panels alone to do what I wanted. Panel efficiency and price has gone down since then, so I would expect that price to be lower now. I wanted enough generation to simultaneously charge two EVs as well as be capable of heating a space. I was planning on doing all the labor myself so that is not in the numbers for cost.

All things told I was prepared to spend around $75k on electrical to make this happen in a remote location, which seemed reasonable to me given the capabilities & stability I would get in return. It is not something most people could afford, but most people here on HN probably could which is why I mentioned it.

Did you consider how that would do in a week-long storm that deposits a foot or more of snow on your panels?

For emergencies, I think I would put more trust in a low-tech wood burner, moving extra wood in-house whenever there’s a serious storm forecast.

Well, I apologize for what I originally said because it seems you have seriously run the numbers out. On its own that still seems like a massive amount of battery for a single dwelling, but hard to put into context without other numbers (design heating load, electrical load, atrophy over time, oversized for slower wear, etc)

Still, in general it seems like the ultimate design constraint is always low probability events adding up - eg solar generation getting severely cut for a week, due to snow on the panels and cloudy days or hardware failure, coupled with many cold nights in a row. For which a fall back to a more traditional denser energy source (wood or gasoline) that you'd end up using every few years comes in much cheaper than trying to oversize the primary battery storage to handle every long tail event.

It seems like any child you would have would be extremely well prepared for wherever the world is going

No one in the US, for instance, has any excuse because it is all very very affordable

More than half of people in the United States may not be able to cover a $1k emergency expense from savings.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/01/19/56p...

While some of that effect is due to economic choices, much of it is not. It is difficult to prepare for a long-tail disaster when you're facing oodles of short-term needs.

People in the US can afford a 5 gallon container of beans and rice. My suggestion isn’t financially impractical for anyone, this is nonsense.

It is just a matter of priorities and knowledge, and who is here on Hacker News reading what I wrote? Is it a population that can afford these suggestions or isn’t it?

> People in the US can afford a 5 gallon container of beans and rice. My suggestion isn’t financially impractical for anyone, this is nonsense.

There are plenty of people in the US who can barely scrape together enough to feed themselves for a day. Telling these people to just spend more money isn't helpful.

I am very aware of the poverty here. I have met people on the roads and in the woods with some incredible stories & lifestyles.

If you are fortunate enough to have a fixed location and are able to survive in general society, I can assure you, you can find some way to scrape together a rolling supply of beans and rice.

If nothing else, these are served in abundance at food banks. I should know because I have friends in some parts of the country who are homeless & regularly used food banks. They had no place to store long term stuff (although I have found buried caches before, I don’t know people who regularly do that) so my advice wouldn’t apply to them, but if someone went to a food bank and had a fixed location for storage, I am sure they would have no trouble being able to secure a large supply of rice and beans.

A large issue with poverty is it generates a mindset where these kinds of preparations are much lower priority than daily survival, so that would be a more reasonable reason to point at I think.

> No one in the US, for instance, has any excuse because it is all very very affordable

As another comment pointed out, median income in Pine Ridge is $4k per year.

I don’t think really any of your advice is compatible with that income level.

I get the impression from a lot of HN comments that many people are unaware of the variability in living standards in a country of 350+MM people

Beans and rice in storage is directly compatible with that income level.

Beans and rice take quite a bit of fuel to cook, and that sounds like a major problem.

>No one in the US, for instance, has any excuse because it is all very very affordable

What a thing to say.

You should start a show. "Survival with Marie Antoinette" is a good title.

> No one in the US, for instance, has any excuse because it is all very very affordable

The article is about the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, with >80% unemployment and average incomes of $4000 per year. I expect their notions of "very affordable" may not match yours.

> If I was in the position most of you are in (I have opted out of the housing market for ethical reasons), I’d also be powered mostly via solar and a 3 day reserve battery for the house.

You are getting a lot of flak for this, but I completely agree. For the salaries many on HN take home (well into the six figures) this should be far more of a priority. There is almost no excuse to not do it in any semi-rural setting - I see it as outright negligence if you make that sort of money and have a living situation that allows it.

You mentioned $75k previously - that would be for an extremely small house. I've also ran the numbers, and for $250-500k (depending on climate) you can basically live in a normal sized house and be completely off-grid indefinitely. That's a ton of money, but almost nothing when compared with a FAANG salary over a decade.

If that is a bit too crazy for you, you can get back to the ~$150k number by the simple addition of a backup generator fueled by on-site propane. Get a few tanks on-site and it's pretty easy to have a 60 day supply on-hand at all times when combined with your solar generation during the day. Propane doesn't go bad so you can basically store it indefinitely. Add in a wood stove and you really can go as long as your food and medical supplies last.

It's strange to me more folks in this position do not make this a priority. Just adding rooftop solar+batteries+roll-up generator seems to be too far "out there" for most people to even consider.

I've noticed since COVID these attitudes are slowly shifting, so we'll see what the future brings. The sheer number of friends I know who have less than a week's worth of food in the house and not even a little Honda 2000w generator is uncomfortable to me.

Count me among the people for whom COVID was the needed wake-up call. I realized how dependent I was on civilization for things like energy, water, and so on, and watched neighborhoods break down into chaos and madness over a few supply shocks. It was the kick in the pants I needed to move the fam out to the boonies. I’m not fully off-grid and independent yet, but for the first time making good forward progress in the right direction. My energy mix is now propane, rooftop solar, a wood furnace, and the grid. I’ve got space on the property to store an abundance of food and water indefinitely. Fresh water stream behind the home. Yea, I know, this makes me barely a Level 1 Noob Prepper, but it's a start. Maybe one day we move more fully off-grid, when we are ready.

I realize a lot of good fortune and privilege allowed this which is why I can’t fault the poor folks in the article.

> I'd say most people, even in rural areas, don't have a supply that'll last longer than that, except for some hardcore preppers.

I disagree. Or, at least where I live (densely populated europe), nearly everyone with their own house has at lease one (small) fireplace with some wood stored outside, typically enough for at least a month (otherwhise, do you go shopping wood every week?). Food-wise I agree that 8 days may touch the limits of food supply for families, but I know plenty people that have pasta / rice in stock for days. And this is in Europe without any wilderness. I cant believe that more rural americans are less equiped than this altough maybe I am wrong.

That is my take as well. Everyone around me keeps at least 1 cord of wood [1] or more. It can get cold here and people are expected to be self sufficient. The less fortunate people instead of buying wood will get a permit from the state to chop wood from a specified area but then they have to haul/cut/dry/season the wood themselves usually borrowing a neighbors trailer. People here are friendly and share tools.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cord_(unit)

People who live on Indian Reservations are frequently really, really poor and likely couldn’t afford to stock up with that much wood beforehand.

You've given me something to go do. I've never visited the reservation near me. [1] If they are unaware of the wood cutting permits [2] I will show them.

[1] - https://windriver.org/destinations/wind-river-indian-reserva...

[2] - https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/mbr/passes-permits/forestprod...

Consider reaching out to your local congressional reps to get some appropriation done where reservation folks are contacted to inform them of their right to the resources and automatically provide the wood cutting permits if done for personal/tribal use. Happy to provide assistance.

I will first reach out to the reservation to learn more about it before I jump to any conclusions. I prefer to speak to the people that live in an area. It may turn out they have everything they need. But I will keep your offer in mind if it turns out things are in a bad state of affairs.

It looks like the Wind River reservation is quite some distance from the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, I don't think ignorance of the permits is their problem.

There are other areas to cut wood. They don't list all of them. The local forestry office may be able to provide closer locations. For example, there is a designated area just a few miles from me but it is not listed on any of the forestry websites. I listed that page to show the permitting process, restrictions and costs. As toomuchtodo pointed out, it may even be free in their case.

There's a good chance that few of those areas are on the reservation, which often were picked to be the worst land in the region. So many still may not live within a convenient distance of an area for wood.

Plus, even if they do live near a forest, I'm not sure if the Forest Service would have jurisdiction. It's possible the tribe has the rights, or the BIA handles it.

Whereabouts is this? Fireplaces are really not common in new developments (Sweden), but I'm not fond of new development houses anyway.

It's a shame for a country with a tradition of beautiful and efficient wood fireplaces like these: https://www.land.se/hus-hem/skaffa-kakelugn-tips-och-rad-du-...

Luxembourg

You can't believe something that is happening?

Enough for a month of what? Small decorative fires part of the day, or fires large enough to heat the house and cook food on 24/7? The fireplaces I’m familiar with would never heat the entire house, no matter how much wood you had outside.

You don't need to heat an entire house to stay alive. Just enough so the people sitting next to the fire don't die of hypothermia

Sure. So enough wood to keep that room warm 12 hours a day for a month suddenly became enough wood to keep that room warm 24 hours a day for two weeks. The family that happened to put in a months supply two weeks before the storm started only had enough for one week of full time fires, and that ran out days ago. (The suburban european houses with a fireplace I know are more likely to burn it a few hours each day, which makes their month of wood worth only a few days of full reliance).

In Pittsburgh after the blizzard, we all slept in the family/living room where the fireplace was, in sleeping bags. I think power was out for a week to 10 days?

You don't need large fires to heat a home. All wood burning furnaces I've used are smaller than a cubic meter.

I grew up in North Dakota, and the place in this news story is in South Dakota. I knew plenty of folks in rural areas with enough resources for weeks, not days. Running water might be the exception, but many farmers I know had well water.

If you have enough fuel then water is not a problem in the snow. I've been in a cabin in Norway when the well which was about 70 metres away was buried in snow but we just took a bucket full of snow in an put it on top of the wood burner to thaw.

Running on a well only gets you so far in the running water game when the power goes out.

> Some people have been completely isolated in their homes for 8 days. I'd say most people, even in rural areas, don't have a supply that'll last longer than that, except for some hardcore preppers.

I wouldn't say that, I try and always have 3 months supply of food on hand in case something happens, even just a temporary job loss, in fact the idea of having less than a full months supply of food on hand seems terrifying to me, as evidenced all you need is one bad winter storm and your looking at starvation.

In fact the church I belong to encourages members to have 1-6 months supply of food on hand in case of emergencies and it would be something I'd recommend everyone do. It gives you substantial peace of mind.

As pointed out elsewhere, this is a very, very poor community. Stockpiling food is likely not an option for most if they truly do have unemployment in the 90% range

Serious question, why aren't the firewood stockpiles in very close proximity to the houses themselves? That's what we do in these parts of the world where I live (Eastern Europe), where even the apartment blocks that still rely on firewood store it very close to the buildings themselves, in walking distance (as can be seen via this GStreetView link [1])

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@46.5413445,22.4545999,3a,49y,10...

Firewood also has pest issues and other problems so you often want to only store as much as you “need” near the dwelling. Remember that the distances aren’t even a football field away; more like across a large street. But under enough snow that’s impossible to pass.

Supply of wood?

In my area people who don't cut their own just buy a cord or whatever they need each fall. Enough to go through winter.

People who cut their own will generally have more than that.

The people I know have propane heaters for backup, with their own tanks. I have a 500 gallon tank.

I'm not a prepper.

They cannot afford to stockpile fuel.

I listen to a podcast by a man who grew up on that reservation. While he was back visiting his grandmother, a propane truck was filling her tank. He told the driver, "Whoa! Stop! We can't afford that much!" The driver told him, "Don't worry, it's free. Venezuela is paying to fill everyone's tank."

Those propane tanks are mostly empty unless Venezuela is paying (before Venezuelan oil revenues dropped, Venezuela provided free propane and heating oil to the desperately poor throughout the US [and many other countries]-- in solidarity. The illegal sanctions by the US and the US's illegal seizure of Venezuela's foreign assets, that have crippled the Venezuelan economy mean it is highly unlikely this Venezuelan program will return.)

Edit: Corrected initial cause of the termination of Venezuela's heating fuel program-- per child comment by vorpalhex.

It looks like that program was halted in 2009 due to oil prices increasing dramatically, not due to sanctions.

You think there is no causal link between the two happenings?

What's the name of the podcast? Sounds interesting.

"The Red Nation Podcast" by The Red Nation

https://therednation.org/

Many of their older episodes are very good, so IMO worth listening to back episodes.

Recently (last couple years?) they merged the, "Red Power Hour" segments into the main podcast feed (it was a separate podcast). I skimmed several of these, but now just skip them-- they were things like (Hollywood) movie reviews and folks in conversation where I didn't feel I learned anything. So, don't discount the whole podcast if the first episode you listen to is one of these. The episodes hosted by Nick Estes are the ones I found the most informative (most of the early episodes fall into this category).

Thanks! I've been looking for a new podcast that I might learn something interesting from... And that's completely outside of my regular wheelhouse. Appreciate the reply!

Regarding the Venezuelan comment: In 2009 the country was also entering economic turmoil, and it never recovered.

I couldn't find anything in English, but this wikipedia page also mentions that propane gas has been in shortage since 2014 domestically for Venezuelans (years before the first sanctions were established): https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escasez_de_combustible_en_Ve....

PDVSA (government company responsible for gas and fuel extraction and processing) has been mismanaged for more than 20 years, the "free" propane was never going to last, and it was extensively used to gain political allies while it was given away.

For those interested, there was a national strike in PDVSA against Hugo Chavez in 2003 that IMHO started the company demise, they fired pretty much anyone who knew how to run it: https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paro_general_en_Venezuela_de...

> the drifts of snow have rendered their wood stockpile inaccessible

It mentions a family running out of baby formula. Baby formula is in short supply around the country and also very expensive - many stores won’t allow you to buy more than one or two cans at once and if you’re buying it with WIC funds then you can’t afford more than a month at a time anyway.

> can’t afford more than a month at a time anyway. A month's worth would easily see them over the current weather problem.

Tangentially related: why does the US have such a problem with supplies of formula milk?

A major supplier recall on top of all the pandemic related logistics issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_infant_form...

This triggered two thoughts for me.

First, how much of a killer the cold is. We've moved on from "global warming" to "climate change" language but there are a lot of places in the world that would be grateful for a few degree temperature rise (such as Latvia where I am from). Today, cold kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, while "heat deaths" are limited to geriatrics in the "first world."

Second, preparedness. Most urbanites and suburbanites don't think about the weather beyond high energy bills. But it's good to pay attention to the fact that if it's 20 degrees or less out (as it is today in NY) and power or gas goes out, your dwelling is going to get real cold real fast. What's your plan? In our case we have a fireplace which is mainly decorative (it doesn't actually warm the house up beyond the immediate radiant heat) but if shit hits the fan, we got firewood enough to huddle up by this fireplace for a few days. Hopefully will never have to rely on it but you kinda have to plan for some infrastructure failings at inconvenient times.

To connect the thoughts together - here, it's not totally uncommon to lose power. When it happens in the summer, it's inconvenient - you are sweaty and hot. If it happens in the winter, there's real risk of death.

> "heat deaths" are limited to geriatrics in the "first world."

There are multiple parts of the world approaching the point of "so hot post-climate-change that you can't survive without air conditioning" at this point, it's not a first world problem.

See the map in https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-hot-to-ha... to get a sense of how it's an increasingly global problem.

As a result eventually power loss will be able to kill you in the summer, too, depending on where you live.

Maybe? I am talking about today. The only number of heat deaths I see on this site is average in the US and its like 100-something, likely more related to the aging of the population than anything else.

To be honest I skimmed this article a few times rather that read it but I don't see anything that points to heat being anything close to the magnitude killer that cold is today. (although apparently in the US heat is a bigger deal probably because we are well equipped to handle both and don't have old people taking walks in freezing weather but they venture out in the summer)

This claim has been made, but it turned out not to be true (so far). I.e. everyone without AC did not die when the wet bulb temperature exceeded the apparent limit: https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/the-mysteriously-low-death...

Minimizing the fact that real humans die from overheating tarnishes an otherwise interesting comment.

I am not minimizing but comparing two sources of danger.

And that the advent of climate control (Air Conditioning) have significantly minimized heat deaths and allowed humans to live in climates that would have historically been impossible.

Well, unless you're poor, fuck you then

We don't need that every comment is written with an universal viewpoint and covering all the bases. It's a conversation here, not an encyclopedia.

Net zero will make this more common, sadly, either through energy insecurity or people being unable to afford to heat their homes.

Energy will be far cheaper when we switch to a fossil fuel free grid, because the newer technologies are cheaper, and unlike fossil fuels they are on a decreasing cost tech curve. So the sooner we build out the tech, the sooner prices fall.

During the winter, and in storms like this, solar and wind is almost nil. Upstate NY gets very cold. And they are mandating people transition away from oil or gas into using heat pumps. Heat pumps are next to worthless in subzero weather. Oh, and they are also trying to phase out nuclear.

I think the ultimate combo will be air source heat pumps and pellet stoves.

Pellet stoves should keep the insurance companies happy. Semi-renewable fuel. Semi-automated operation with minimal fire risk.

Not much more expensive than nat gas, much cheaper than oil and propane, and most importantly: no nat gas network/connection/account/delivery charge.

How are pellets semi-renewable? Pellets are still burned up. Are the ashes re-used?

Pellets come from atmospheric CO2.

Of course you re-use the ashes. Great source of potassium for the garden. The modern day fertilizer potassium-source isn’t called “potash” for nothing.

Improves traction on ice, and could melt snow if it’s close enough to freezing.

Could also make soap with it if you wanted to get really creative. Or bricks or mortar (or a concrete supplement).

Pellets grow on^W^W are trees.

Wood-pellet fuel is largely a by-product of existing forestry activity.

<https://www.canr.msu.edu/wood_energy/bulk_pellets>

In the sense that trees are a resource which regrows after harvesting, unlike mined fossil fuels,[1] wood pellets are renewable.

There's reasonable concern that at quantities meaningful for replacing existing fuels, fuel-wood, including wood pellets, would not be renewable, though at what quantity that concern manifests I'm not sure.

Reasonably small-scale local burning of wood on an occasional basis can be sustainable. There are significant issues with air quality especially in traditional open-hearth fireplaces. The best heating stoves are enclosed as with cast-iron stoves, masonry heaters / masonry stoves, and the like. The actual firebox is often not directly visible, air intake is directly from the outside (so that warm air isn't sucked out of the structure), and heat is radiated through thermal mass and channeling. These stoves also burn more efficiently (high temperatures and optimised airflow) greatly reducing pollution concerns with particulates.

See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater>

________________________________

Notes:

1. Note that the "fossil" in "fossil fuels" doesn't refer to petrified bone, but to things which have been dug up. "Fossil fuel" is fuel dug from the ground, as "fossil bones" are bones dug from the ground. The meanings of "turned to stone" (e.g., fossilised), or "old" (he's a fossil) are much more recently acquired meanings. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/fossil>

Is this true? It contradicts everything I know about energy. Can you post some evidence?

Here's a paper that is the best single source of quantification of learning curves that I know of:

https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/publications/no-2021-01-empiricall...

With a detailed podcast episode here:

https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-159-the-cost-of-d...

But any single paper in the literature shouldn't be trusted on its own. So I would encourage anybody who is interested to look for themselves at cost curves over time for solar wind and storage, and notice how they all follow Wright's law very well. And then look at the ever-increasing cost of fossil fuel extraction, as we need ever more sophisticated techniques to continue matching supply to demand as the easier sources are extracted.

Wind solar and storage behave like proper technologies. Fracking did to some extent, but it is technology for making something that was impossible into the possible; and there's finite amounts of frackable resources. Oil and natural gas have price floors set by these fracking costs, which have not dropped precipitously in the past 10 years.

We have not yet reached the inflection points on wind water and solar where the logistic curve switches to the linear phase. So we likely have decades of similar cost reductions for these technologies, almost certainly. If you look at where that leaves us for an energy future, it's unbelievably rosy. That is, as long as we invest in the tech.

The technologies you mention are all intermittent, though.

Storage is not intermittent, and it's on there.

Distributed solar with storage is baseload technology.

The end state is great. It's people dying during the transition that worries me.

Why would anybody die during the transition? Especially if we do the transition as quickly as possible, we will be adding new resources to the grid while existing fossil fuel resources are still there.

In the US the grid problems are generally from having inadequate grid resources, and adding more will only help.

Have you not seen energy prices lately? I feel like when we discuss energy transition we get into a no-true Scotsman argument.

I can't imagine what people in upstate NY are going to do in temperatures like this with only a heat pump, since they are trying to transition everyone off gas or oil. A heat pump is next to worthless in sub zero temps. Many will use wood.

Where I live in rural England, when the new gas prices were announced in July that chap that sells one tone bags of logs for wood burners had his busiest day ever. Log burners are lot less clean than gas.

In addition to the above, learn how to start a fire in your fireplace. I had used up my last (easy start) duraflame log a few days ago. "No problem," I thought to myself, "I have this pile of firewood here to use." Fortunately I wasn't under a time crunch to get it started, because I failed on a few attempts, had to forage for some kindling, etc.

Old newspaper used to work well for kindling. But fewer people get their newspapers delivered in print. Used paper grocery bags could work.

Also proper organization of the wood, I have a wood stove (had one growing up as well) and learning how to build a little pyramid or log cabin like structure around something flammable helps a lot to circulate air allowing the fire to spread to larger pieces of wood. EDIT: old newspaper is good, I often use "junk mail" as long as it doesn't contain any plastic, where I am stores will still send out some paper flyers.

Don't discount using dryer lint and left over cooking grease as a starter. I have a woodstove at the house, and I use both to get it going. Left over bacon grease on a few paper towels with dryer lint around/on top of it, and a few smaller pieces of soft wood like pine. Larger/heaver wood on top and behind it like oak. Make sure to also pre-heat the exhaust vent pipe, get a draft of air going.

Hadn't thought of dryer lint, with three kids I have that in abundance!

> Make sure to also pre-heat the exhaust vent pipe, get a draft of air going.

How does one do that?

If you can start with a hot fire and sufficient kindling, you don't always need to do it as a separate step, but otherwise you can burn crumpled newspaper, use a hairdryer or heat gun, or sometimes even a large candle. If the room temp is higher than the outside, sometimes just a fan is enough.

After stocking the woodstove and building the base, I get a wad of newspaper and put dryer lint in it. Then put the wad on top of the log pile right under the flue/exhaust pipe and light it. Then immediately light the rest of my kindling to get the fire going.

This stuff is amazing: https://www.fatwood.com/

Two little sticks of that, and you can mostly skip the super-thin kindling in favor of sticks.

> We've moved on from "global warming" to "climate change" language

Presumably because during winter certain people would point at a freak snowstorm and say "so much for global warming!" to try to minimise it (tbh they still do). Temperature rising has a few more side-effects than just your winter being milder by 1-2C, I think using a different term is entirely appropriate

No, because they are both accurate descriptions, but "global warming" is talking about the average temp. Even as the average goes up, the standard deviation could change too, meaning that even with higher average temp, there can be bigger and colder winter storms, which are balanced out by even higher temps the rest of the time.

There were studies 10-20 years ago predicting that global warming will bring with it completely unpredictable weather and harsher extremes in both directions.

Do any governments or institutions have a live(ish) updating model of "what would happen" if trends continue? People reference studies all the time but what's the currently accepted model/outcome in the scientific community?

I remember hearing that melting of the ice caps will stop current flows in the ocean and bring about an ice age. Is that actually a thing or just fake news?

One of the things is a weakening jet stream which has caused all the recent havoc on getting cold polar air come inland.

This is why climate change vs global warming. We’re in for a hell of winters in the US as the jet stream weakens.

It's difficult, like the difference between knowing a car is going crash and being able to estimate how it will look afterward. You can (to some extent) access these models and try them out yourself: https://juliahub.com/ui/Packages/ClimateModels/dFyeI/0.2.15

Is a real concern. Half of Europe is "kissed" by tropical seawater running from the Gulf of Mexico towards Russia. This hot water creates a warmer than expected climate in the coastal areas. Portugal, UK, Denmark, Norway... all is warmer that it should be. If this current stops flowing or is weakened things will suck real fast.

Wait, why "No"? We're saying the same thing in different way.

you:

> meaning that even with higher average temp, there can be bigger and colder winter storms

me:

> Temperature rising has a few more side-effects than just your winter being milder by 1-2C

Another thing we can spell out is that the rising average temperature is an average over the whole year, over the whole planet. I.e any particular location or country could have a sinking average temperature.

The same thing happens on the flip side. I have a coworker who genuinely believes every big hurricane is caused by global warming and that if it wasn’t for global warming it would snow more.

Well that just goes to show that it's possible to be either naive and broadly in agreement with scientific consensus or naive and in agreement with some loud non-scientists who live in the TV and give you the news :)

I guess the harm in the former is that they'll be held up in bad-faith in a similar manner to the "so much for climate change" argument.

Heat is less likely to kill you directly if you aren't forced to do physical work without any protection. However, tens of thousands of square kilometers of agricultural land is turned to desert in Central Europe with every single degree the yearly average temperature rises. Droughts are decimating crops made for prices skyrocket even before the war in Ukraine. That has some harder to attribute but none of the less serious killer potential.

On your other thoughts: I live in a well insulated home (30 cm brick wall with 18 cm graphite insulation). With a 30 celsius difference in internal and external temperature and no heating, my living room drops about 1,5 - 2 Celsius a day. Starting from 21, that gives a week before situation starts to become serrious during a complete blackout.

Heat has a well-defined kills-you-automatically limit of ~35 celsius wet bulb temperature. There isn’t a similar limit for cold.

Interesting, can you explain more about this type of insulation?

It's just polystyrene. The graphite is a marketing term that doesn't have much to do with the material properties.

That temperature drop sounds very unlikely. If you live in a well insulated home then you must have ventilation too, and that alone should replace the air inside multiple times each day.

I have measured this while being away for a week during winter.

While there is ventilation in the building, it's off while noone is at home.

Although the scenario in question was for a complete blackout where the ventillation would be off as anyway, your are right that people inside would need to open windows every now and then which would increase heat loss.

I mean it works both ways, e.g. thousands of sq km of Russia and Canada become would likely become fertile agricultural land.

Not really. Russian and Canadian land will become warmer but does it have good topsoil?

I'm perplexed how folks using gas or wood apparently have less than a week or two worth of heating stored. Back when I lived in small village we always had at least month+ (not too uncommon to buy the supply for whole winter too) worth of coal/wood there.

Wood is usually cheaper if you buy it green and season it yourself, but it’s a situation where it’s expensive to be poor so maybe they buy it dried or as needed through winter.

You can burn green wood, it’ll just be harder to start/less efficient. If you have no choice…

Wood pellets are usually cheaper in summer (and often not much more expensive than firewood once you account for the higher efficiences of pellet stoves).

If you put a woodstove insert into the fireplace, you will get a lot more heat radiated into the house.

Is the fireplace ready to use? Is it clear of obstructions (e.g., birds, bats and insect nests)? Have you cleared out any "creosote" (deposition from incomplete past combustion) which can make the chimney burn like a jet engine (very exciting)?

Actually started a fire in the chimney and keeping it burning safely for several days can be enlightening (i hesitate to say "fun", except for the children). Try it with someone knowledgeable assisting. Keep fire extinguishers (emphasis on the plural) handy.

Moreover, the way fireplaces work is that the fire heats up some kind of heavy construction (cast iron, brick, etc) and that then radiates heat. Not every fireplace is built that way - some of them are decorative and will actually make you colder.

Quite a few people found out in not a nice way last time Texas has winter storm.

Yeah if you want to rely on it as heat source you should probably get something modern that doesn't waste exhaust heat and doesn't suck the air out of the room getting more cold air in. Not just "a hole in a roof above a fire".

I am the original poster. As I said in my post, the fireplace is mainly decorative and we are NOT relying on it for heat. However it is our plan B/C if shit hits the fan, in which case huddling the family in front of the radiant fire is a much preferable alternative to dying of cold, efficiency aside.

Well, wet heat (35+ degrees Celsius and 90+ humidity) can potentially kill you as well, as you might not be able to keep your body temperature within safe range by sweating.

Very few places use electricity for heat. It’s super inefficient unless you use a heat pump, and residential heat pumps typically don’t work too far below freezing.

Most furnaces require electricity to run even if the heat isn’t generated by electricity.

Exactly

Very few? Maybe for single family homes, but electric heat is very common in apartments - Every apartment I've ever lived in had electric baseboard heaters.

Apparently it's #2 is the US with 37% of homes.

https://www.climatecentral.org/news/your-heating-fuel-depend...

Now that I live in a single family house I use oil to heat the house - but the boiler requires electricity.

37% makes sense. When you live in a moderate climate and minimally need heating, low capex and high opex makes sense.

Too bad so many air conditioners don’t have reversing valves. One day I want to install a window-shaker “the wrong way” and see how well it works as a heater.

As an alternative, one could put water containers in their freezer and throw the ice outside as it freezes as a rudimentary sneakernet liquid<-> solid phase change heat pump.

The whole world being a couple degrees hotter is not guaranteed to be equally distributed. The reason why Latvia, and most of "Northern" Europe is livable instead of a frozen wasteland is due to climate mechanisms that we're not entirely sure how sensitive they are to climate change

It might get a bit warmer, it might get a lot hotter or it might even get a whole lot colder

Climate change is a better term because the change itself is unpredictable and likely damaging in the short term

I don't disagree with your logic but your conclusion that one term is better than the other. The globe is warming, and individual climates are changing as a result. One is not a better term then the other, people are just using the wrong terms to suit their agendas.

In an ideal world I'd agree, but since one term is dramatically easier to misrepresent I still think the equivalent but more understandable term is better

> there are a lot of places in the world that would be grateful for a few degree temperature rise

That's not how global warming works. It's not a "everywhere will go up 1 degree". It causes more extremes. Hot places can get hotter, cold places colder, but overall, the average goes up.

The most intuitive way I've heard it explained is that of a long-tailed bell-curve. The mean temperature may only move a few degrees but it causes a more dramatic relative increase in the amount of area under the extreme values.

I'm not a fan of either of those terms. "Climate instability" seems a better way to depict what's going on. "Climate abnormalities", "climate volatility", etc.

There are ways to donate to help them.

https://friendsofpineridgereservation.org/an-electric-heater...

Henry Red Cloud helps change this situation through solar installation, forest planting and foamcrete housing. Truly amazing efforts.

https://www.redcloudrenewable.org/

Henry Red Cloud is a good man and does really good work on the rez!

Can reservations call in the national guard. Seems like such the situation to ask for military to step in to assist and evacuate (or drop supplies to) stranded families.

Seems like it would be the last thing I’d burn for warmth…

There's only so many you can put on at once, and they're one of the cheaper things people own these days.

You can still use them for insulation.. I doubt polyester or cotton would burn very long.

Don’t need them to burn for very long, cotton should have roughly the same energy density as wood by weight. Burning bags of cold clothes that don’t fit isn’t that bad of an idea.

Negative teens is brutal, even a well insulated house loses a lot of heat if you want it comfortable but there’s a big range between uncomfortable and dead. -15f to 30f is the same difference as 30f and 75f.

> same energy density as wood by weight

which means they'll provide a few minutes of heat at best. You'd be better off using them as blankets or letting some water freeze them into scoop shapes and turning them into makeshift shovels.

They also aren't going to burn nearly as cleanly as wood, meaning the burn will be far less efficient.

Depending on the size of area that you're heating, getting from -15 to 30F will take at least a solid hour of burning cleanly.

It isn’t going to be clean burning, but the clothes are presumably bone dry which helps.

Really though it’s not about how good an energy source this is, but just how much old junk people have. I have seen people toss several hundred pounds of old clothes that don’t have any real value. It’s the same with old books they don’t burn that well but when you have a half a ton you might as well burn em vs toss them in a landfill.

If they had several hundred pounds of old clothes they can build a gigantic pillow fort and huddle together in the middle with a candle. This would be better than burning the clothes, as I assume they have enough food.

A pillow fort doesn’t keep liquids above freezing so you have something to drink.

Insulation doesn't provide warmth, it only reduces the rate of heat loss. If it's already so cold you are looking for things in your home to burn for heat, using clothes to insulate it (rather than burn them) isn't going to help.

But that's not the point, the dire situation with little support is the point.

You don't insulate the house; you insulate your body. If you're at the point of burning clothes to heat the house, heating the house is already a lost cause unless you have a lot of clothes.

But they would burn terribly, clog your chimney, and are more effective when worn.

It just seems to me that they would be more effective if worn. Even if they don't fit, cut them up and stitch up gloves and cover-ups.

I’m not asking this to be condescending, but have you ever felt cold?

My hands lose all dexterity entirely in winter. With sufficiently cold weather my hands are either cold, stiff, and in pain, or I’m wearing gloves that are too bulky to be useful for anything other than crudely gripping large objects or swatting things away. These people are experiencing cold beyond what I’ve ever experienced, so I can’t even begin to imagine how much worse it is.

If people are burning things for warmth, they are absolutely not going to be holding a needle.

well the article cites -20 I assume based on area F so ~ -7C

...really -7C is cold beyond what you ever experienced ? It's not too bad. I'd imagine the main problem is if those temperatures are rare just nobody have proper clothes to handle it

-20 F is -29.6C

-20 C is ~ -7F

No, what I did is 20F to ~ -7C

I hate that fucking stupid unit

But yeah, that's "my face hurt being outside" kind of bad ;/

Yeah, i had to burn furniture once in a slightly similar freeze situation.

In a survival situation, do what you have to do. That being said, I suspect you really do not want to be next to a modern-furniture fire. Almost certainly full of the worst glues, insecticides, anti-flammables (ha), etc.

Then I guess you know how desperate they are.

Depends on how much they have. Bulk used clothes can be had for incredibly cheap, to the point where it can be cheaper than wood. And after decades of people building up old worn out clothes you will have a lot of relatively worthless cloth material. There are places in the world where burning clothes isn't uncommon at all because they receive so much clothing waste from the rest of the world attempting and failing to not throw them into landfills.

Sadly it’s increasingly polyester/nylon/spandex and such. Cotton would be pretty clean to burn, but would burn very quickly.

I wonder if there could be some kind of inland Cajun Navy [1] which operates using trucks and plows or snowmobiles instead of boats for disasters like this. Although given the remoteness and conditions this just might not be possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajun_Navy?wprov=sfti1

From TFA: “Our wood pile remains inaccessible.” They have wood but they cannot reach it to make deliveries to people in the area. Several decades ago, I recall driving along I90 in SD a few days after a large storm, and we saw drifts as tall as the highway underpasses. It was incredible. Driven snow takes on a texture that is different from powder, more like soft concrete. When the snow is sufficiently deep, there is no place to put it even if you are able to shovel or plow it.

I am sure I don't understand the nuances of this situation but it seems a major failure of foresight and your emergency supplies should be stored so that they are accessible where they are needed if shit hits the fan.

Not sure how they can deliver firewood when the roads are impassible. And in very heavy snowfall -- esp dry powder that you get when the air is, and stays, very cold -- you'll continue to get significant amounts of snow on the roads long after it stops snowing as the wind blows it onto the road.

Additionally, a well-maintained suv with 4wd and snow tires isn't a cheap thing to own and maintain.

And if you get your car stuck somewhere with wind chills dipping to -50F, dying of hypothermia is a possible and/or likely outcome.

You can really tell who has never lived through a serious winter.

In the winter the firewood should be stored right next to the house, some of it inside the house. In fact the wood that you intend to burn now should be inside the house otherwise when you put it on the fire it will depress the fire. I have one day of firewood stacked next to the woodburner and several weeks in the vindfang (an unheated porch with doors both sides). The rest is stacked at the back of the house and it would be accessible even if a drift buried the house assuming that we are just averagely fit.

We aren't preppers but it makes no sense to rely on just in time deliveries in midwinter so we buy or otherwise obtain the wood for most of the winter in October or November

Firewood deliveries have been a regular occurrence in past years [0,1]. It seems plausible that these past deliveries established a central place where wood is stored, and it also established a local norm where firewood is distributed. Also, this is the high plains where trees grow near rivers but basically don't grow in outlying areas, with the result that general access to wood is not easy for everyone. So it's also plausible that local conditions have established another local norm where maintaining a 3 month stash of firewood is just not done.

[0] https://www.forestsandrangelands.gov/documents/success/rushm...

[1] https://www.blackhillsfox.com/content/news/Military-supplies...

You store firewood for heating at your house for emergencies. The solution is a pile, not an SUV.

The National Gaurd was been called out to help 2 days ago. If you want to donate https://friendsofpineridgereservation.org/a-blankets-quilts-...

I could make a horrible joke that at least lithium batteries in an EV would burn for days if not weeks for warmth.

But if I had to suffer by boiling in a desert vs sub-freezing cold stealing all heat, I would take the boiling, freezing feels like death way before it happens.

I imagine too much modern comfort somehow dulls survival prep and caution in the winter in those areas. Too many "easy" winters and caution fades just like people in Florida who avoid hurricanes for several years disregard warnings about a new one to their downfall.

>But if I had to suffer by boiling in a desert vs sub-freezing cold stealing all heat, I would take the boiling, freezing feels like death way before it happens.

This reminded me of an old poem by Robert Frost memorized back in grade school - Fire and Ice.

[0]https://poets.org/poem/fire-and-ice

That was fascinating, thank you for enlightening me to it.

I always wonder why the military isn’t used in these situations. Can’t they airdrop supplies easily? Isn’t there a gigantic unused workforce that could shovel people out?

Soldiers aren’t any more weatherproof than normal humans. Working in those temperatures is equally deadly for them and civilians

Good equipment can go a long ways. In fact another post says the national guard IS being sent.

It took me a while to figure out where Pine Ridge is. The local newspapers should mention that given they are all online.

Local newspapers are written for a local audience

I am not an American, been in US couple of times as a tourist. But I used to believe that US values lives of their citizens. I am not talking about Saving Private Ryan stuff, but take the recent event of exchanging American basketball player detained in Russia to an outrage war criminal in the middle of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That Bout guy will definitely help Putin to kill quite a lot of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians in the next several months or even years. But US still exchanged him.

Now, I am reading the news that tens of people in the US are dying in snowstorms. 49, current official number is. Where are the effort to save them and more? Where are snowplows, bulldozers, helicopters, National Guard, army? Isn't this as serious as a typical tropical cyclone? Or US citizens in Florida and Miami are somehow different from those from South Dakota or Buffalo?

So where is the National Guard and FEMA? Isn't this the kind of situation FEMA was created for?

https://www.fema.gov/about/organization/tribes

Why hasn't Biden declared a Presidential Emergency?

Im not saying the Russians have weather modification tech but... someone has been poking the sleeping bear.

Modern people really has lost the old skill to analyze problems creatively

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-t-sh...

And I'm not dismissing the situation or laughing about other's misery, but it looks like a poor solution

So what your solution is some idiotic record stunt instead? Put so many shirts that you can’t see and barely move? Nah I’ll just burn shit. Also that record is from 2019. In what delusional universe is 2019 not “modern people”.

> Put so many shirts that you can’t see and barely move?

Don't argue the metaphor. I know that you understand the general idea.

Yep, "My" solution is "put this clothes in your own body instead to burn them, and will warm you for a much much, longer time". Hardly original or controversial.

If the options are ridiculous but alive or stilish and frozen, seems an easy choice

What in earth does any of that even mean? What the fuck is an “alive” or “stilish” option. You seem to be writing complete nonsense. Did you have a stroke?

> What is an “alive” or “stilish” option

alive means: having life, living

stilish (should be written stylish in fact, my bad) means: conforming to the current fashion

I’m very well alive means in a vacuum, but what makes an option (in this case I’m assuming an article of clothing , but it’s hard to tell as this seems to be mostly unintelligible ramble) “alive” as opposed to perhaps “dead”.

I’m astounded by the family who didn’t feed their infant for 4 days because they couldn’t get formula. Isn’t breast feeding preferable to your child starving to death?

I’m likely astounded some people are not aware that not every women can breastfeed their children

I don't think one should be angry at people that are wrong. I mean, unless he asked and someone told him he might have gone around thinking they choose to let the baby starve etc.

Astounded != angry does it?

Ye not directed directly at GP. I tried to whine about downvotes without writing the d-word.

? I was replying to your comment.

To clarify: I agree that the "astounded" comment was not an angry comment.

Milk production might not start at all, it might start but ends unless used.

When you haven't breastfeed your baby the entirety of their infancy the breast milk dries up. The mother can no longer breastfeed their baby because their body thinks that their baby is all grown up (or dead) because it hasn't been drinking the milk.

You can't just choose to breastfeed on a dime like that, you have to breastfeed from the beginning and continue on to keep up the milk supply. This is of course assuming you have sufficient capacity in the breasts to keep the baby alive in the first place, something not all women have these days.

Breast feeding is not always possible, some women are unable to nurse for various reasons and in some rare cases babies can have an allergic reaction to things in their mother's breast milk (that makes it way in from the mother's diet). There are probably other reasons I'm not aware of that could be in play, too.

Some women just can't. I guess they didn't have cow milk or whatever either.

Otherwise, I guess feeding the baby cow milk is preferable to not eating?

Doesn't work like that friend.

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