Category: Preparedness
Okay, getting back to that rudely truncated reader survey on debt and preparedness … the survey company was kind enough to give me a couple of free days in which I could grab the accumulated results. Technically, I could have continued taking data after that, but I didn’t know when access would be cut off again (though I did learn I could pay $19.99 to go on surveying after that). So I made a pdf of the results and here you go: Debt and Preparedness Survey Results as of August 14, 2016. There’s more detail in the pdf, including graphs.…
Via Firehand, I see that the book The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 is available free online via the U.S. Geological Survey.
Though technically a research paper, it is in fact, a lively, well-illustrated account of how researchers in two countries gradually came to realize that Cascadia was never the seismically moderate region once imagined, but is in fact prone to some of the largest earthquakes possible — with accompanying tsunamis (that in this case helped solve the puzzle of the Cascadia subduction zone).
The New York Fed recently announced that U.S. household debt has ticked up again. Small percentages but still big numbers. More worrisome is the type of debt responsible for the increase: Household debt — which includes things as varied as mortgages and credit cards — increased to $12.29 trillion in the second quarter of 2016, an increase of $35 billion, or 0.3%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit. “Overall household debt remains 3.1% below its 2008 Q3 peak of $12.68 trillion, but is now 10.2% above the 2013Q2 trough,” the…
Went to a summer festival this weekend with my friend G. There were were, among the strolling, carefree crowd, lugging these big saddlebags of gear.
G. and I are very different people. She’s a short, beautiful, church-going, civic-minded, family-oriented workaholic professional. I’m a tall, plain*, skeptical, Outlaw layabout who gave up family as a bad job 20-some years ago. She’s a staunch Republican conservative who worries about deteriorating morality and sports a “Hillary for Jail” bumper sticker on her vehicle. I’m an anarchist libertine** who’s v*ting for Sweet Meteor O’ Death.
But we are alike in that both of us, everywhere we go, haul these hefty bags of gear. In a pinch, if we needed to, between the two of us we could feed the multitudes keep ourselves fed and watered for a day, perform minor first aid, cut off a seatbelt, find magnetic north, call for help with a spare device, see in the dark, and have a good chance of preventing a bad situation from turning worse. Thanks to my new compact binoculars, I could even spot a rose-breasted grosbeak if some grosbeak-related emergency arose.
“Why Linkedin will make you hate Microsoft.” Wait. What? You don’t already hate Microsoft? But seriously, if they really do what this NYT article says they’re planning, we’re talking whole new levels. Wow. Beer can, mama bear, and don’t-forget-the-dog save a woman during a long ordeal. But note what she really wishes she hadn’t left at home. Have you ever sensed that Snopes.com, the great All-Powerful Fact-Checker of the Intertubz, sometimes needs fact-checking itself — particularly on political issues? Turns our you’re quite right. Look who’s providing those political “facts”. Makes me sad. Snopes has been a valuable resource and…