Category: relocation

08:40 – Yesterday, Barbara put a reserve hold on Ted Koppel’s new book, Lights Out. There won’t be much if anything in the book that I don’t already know, but it’ll be interesting to see Koppel’s take on the issue.

Most of my readers are already aware that a long-term grid-down situation is the worst nightmare imaginable for any prepper. Being without utility power for an extended time would literally destroy our country. It would probably kill off 10% of our population within weeks, and perhaps 80%+ within a year. Call it 250 million dead, just in the US and Canada. Modern society simply cannot survive without electricity. That’s the point Koppel is making, along with the fact that there are many different threats that could cause such a disaster, from hackers taking down the computers that control our grids to a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) to an intentional electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

It’s difficult to estimate the probability of such events. The best probability estimates I’ve seen of a catastrophic CME are 1% to 1.2%. Per year. Those estimates come from NASA and various scientific journal papers. I don’t know enough about space weather to judge their validity, but they seem convincing.

An EMP attack is within the capabilities of various nations and groups who hate the US. All it would take is one small fission device detonated at very high altitude over the central US to cause incredible and long-lasting destruction to our power grids. North Korea has already demonstrated such a device, as has Pakistan. Iran probably isn’t far from having them, if it doesn’t already. Note that neither a fission warhead nor even just a fission bomb is necessary. All they need is a fission device. That’s because the device will detonate in space. That makes it a couple orders of magnitude easier to achieve. Designing a warhead to survive re-entry is the hard part. Any number of nations, including China, Iran, and North Korea, have missiles capable of boosting such a device to the required altitude. It could be done easily from a freighter outside US waters.

As to hackers, who knows? The fact that parts of our grid are controlled by Internet-connected PCs running Windows XP makes me think it’s just a matter of time. When one considers all the possible threats, it seems reasonable to me to assign a tentative probability of 10% per year to a catastrophic grid-down event. And that’s much too high to be acceptable.

The recovery time would depend on the cause of the event. A cyber attack would probably cause the least physical damage of the three, although there’s still the potential for significant physical damage to distribution. If we were lucky, we might see power start to be restored within weeks and a return to normal within months. A Carrington-class CME would cause more physical damage, although that could be limited to some extent because we could expect to have at least several hours’ to a day or so notice of the actual impact. Things could be taken off-line and protected against the flux. Whether or not that would happen would depend on the decision makers. They might well hesitate to cause a complete disruption of the power grid, even knowing what was about to occur. The EMP attack would cause incredible damage, because it would happen on essentially zero notice. There would not be time to take any protective actions. High-voltage transmission lines would be destroyed, along with the transformers and other gear required to control them. And those aren’t things you can just order from Amazon Prime. Most of the equipment is made outside the US, and even if the factories that make them were unaffected (a big if) the lead times on them run to months or even years.

On a lighter note, here’s another example of why I despair about modern eduction: Can you solve the 50 cent maths exam question that is dividing the internet?

Anyone who needs more than a fraction of a second to come up with the correct answer doesn’t understand basic geometry. Those 12-sided coins have interior angles of 30 degrees (360 degrees / 12 = 30 degrees). The angle in question is twice that, or 60 degrees. That should be obvious at a glance to anyone who’s passed basic geometry.

10:37 – A few minutes ago, as we were binning seed bags, our real-estate agent in Sparta called. The second-mortgage holder countered our $5,000 offer verbally with $7,000. We agreed, so at this point we’re waiting for the second-mortgage holder to sign the agreement. When that happens, things will start to move quickly. We’ll close on the house in a couple weeks.

08:34 – We’re still waiting to hear about the house we made an offer on. It’s a short sale, which complicates things, and the owners had also filed for bankruptcy back in 2013, which complicates things further. The bankruptcy court apparently cleared the bankruptcy in November 2014, but there are still two claims showing against the title. One of them is a pest control company, which is probably only for a few hundred dollars, but the other is by a mortgage company for $27,000. The owners claim that both of those claims were vacated during the bankruptcy, which makes sense, but they’re still showing on the official records. Our broker told me yesterday that it seems likely that the owners’ bankruptcy attorney didn’t do his job to get those liens cleared after the bankruptcy, so they’re currently waiting for him to correct matters. If they can get these issues cleared up, things may begin moving quickly and we may be able to close within the next 30 days or so.

Barbara got a junk mail solicitation yesterday from AAA. She walked into my office, handed me the application, and said she thought we should join. I agreed, so I called them and signed up. The basic membership was $49/year, but included only three free miles of towing. After that, it was $4/mile. The upgraded membership at $84/year included free towing up to 100 miles. Given what we’re likely to be doing over the next year, Barbara said and I agreed that the upgraded membership made sense for us, so I signed up for it. The only question they asked was whether we owned an RV, a motorcycle, or a dualie pickup truck. Presumably they charge more per year if someone owns any of those. We don’t.

I spent some time yesterday working on the instruction guide for the open-pollinated seed kit and will continue work on it today. All but two of the first batch of these kits are already spoken for, but we’ll continue to accept orders for now at the $100 price. If you want to order a kit or kits, see yesterday’s post.

14:34 – We have commenced work on the Augean Stables, AKA my office. The only real differences are that the Augean Stables had been cleaned more recently than my office, and that I have only three or four cattle in my office. Unless some are still staying hidden.

I remember 15 years or so ago, Barbara was complaining about how cluttered and dirty my office was. (That was back before she just gave up on it.) I downloaded and showed her photos of Anand’s office and Pournelle’s office, both of which looked pretty much identical to mine. Of course, Jerry cleaned up his office a bit shortly after that. Roberta had finally made good on her threat to do it herself. She was hauling boxes out of the Great Room and dropping them over the railing to plummet down into the trash cart she’d rolled into the foyer, one floor down. He finally got serious about cleaning up himself when he caught her about to drop a sealed full case of new hard drives over the edge and into the trash cart.

Once we get this place mostly cleaned out, I’ll have just what I need for immediate tasks–shipping kits, stuff I’m currently writing, and so on. When we finally get moved out of here, I’ll take my desk with me. It’s a 3-0 solid-core door, mounted in a corner to 2X6’s bolted into the studs, with the free corner sitting on a 2-drawer file cabinet. That, and removing my bookshelves, which are 1X10 pine boards supported by screw-in wall brackets, means we’ll have a lot of patching, spackling, and painting to do. In fact, we’ll probably paint most of the walls that are currently painted, and probably the ceilings as well. Flat white for the ceilings, gloss ivory for the woodwork and doors, and I’d guess eggshell for the walls throughout. Something nice and neutral that a new buyer can live with.

10:51 – We spent yesterday up in Sparta looking at houses. We decided to put in an offer on one of them. It’s a beautiful house, sitting on about 1.5 acres of level ground that gets plenty of sun. It’s a short sale, which complicates matters somewhat because the bank is involved.

The house was built in 2006, but it was built right, with solid cherry floors on the main level, cherry cabinetry and good built-in appliances in the kitchen, and so on. The primary heating and AC is via heat pump, but there’s also a ducted woodstove in the basement that can heat the entire house if necessary.

One of the other homes we looked at was obviously owned by preppers. One of the basement rooms had three 10-foot islands of five-shelf 2-foot wide floor-to-ceiling shelving units. Three hundred square feet (30 square meters) of shelves, all filled with canned goods, dry staples, and so on. I don’t know how large the family is, but I’m guessing there was food for one year for a family of six or eight people.

Then as we were driving down the road, our real estate agent announced out of the blue that she was a prepper, and had been all her life. She’s a couple years older than I am, and she said she’d grown up on a farm and she still maintains a large garden, hunts and fishes, shoots recreationally, keeps tons of stored food, has the ability to heat her home off-grid, and all the other stuff preppers do. I wasn’t surprised when she added that that was the norm in Sparta, where even people who don’t consider themselves preppers are semper paratus. It’s just part of living in an isolated mountain town.

So now we’re waiting for the sellers and their bank to approve or reject our offer. We should hear from them within the next few days.