Conflicted Monday

After being tempted to start with “well it depends….” I think this one works out pretty easily for me.

The wife and I are 30. Mr(s). 28 fits into our peer group nicely, represents another set of ready hands and… well we may not be 70 year old fonts of experiential knowledge but we ARE practitioners of modern survival. We’ve been amassing our own repertoire of skills for exactly these reasons and that makes it a bit less scary to wade in without “the expert”. Add in the possibility that your elderly encyclopedia is a potential weak link and even in ideal circumstances you would only have so much time (5? 10? years) to try and glean all of that knowledge and I only feel better making the choice of the younger comrade. When my 10 year timeline choices are a) 3 40ish team mates with 10 years of teamwork experience and hands on experience or b) 2 40ish team mates who have been learning from a mentor for 10 years who has just died taking most of their knowledge with them I will go with A every time.

OH…. 100% the Knowledge, the 70 year old female. Knowledge is power, power is you eating, drinking, growing and surviving.

Steven Harris
CEO KnowledgePublications.com
p.s. I had this thing for knowledge for a long time 🙂

I’ll take that action Jack, 6 pack of local beer? Only reason is that nobody can be right all the time, I’m betting that this time, you’ll be wrong just by the odds. Plus I have a hunch that Rand Paul will be the nominee, and I don’t think he’ll do that.

My favorite quote from today’s episode: “You only threaten people when you already have control, when you’re scared you’re going to lose it. That is your government today.”

Nailed it!

“Dinosaur in a Haystack” by Stephen Jay Gould is collection of articles concerning questions of paleontology and evolution, snails and celestial mechanics. One of the articles in this book has the same title as the book itself and debunks the idea that we should see a lot of dead dinosaur bones around the time of the asteroid impact on Earth that killed off the dinosaurs.

Dr. Gould makes a statistical argument that in fact we should see FEWER dinosaur bones as one approaches the “drop dead” date. It is difficult to do his argument justice here, but if you’d like to read the article, Jack, I have the book on my shelf and I’ll be glad to loan it to you.

In any case, I wanted Gould to be wrong but he convinced me he was right using logic and statistics. The asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.

Let’s look at it this way, using a silly example:

Let’s say a thousand years from now, future archeologists will be digging through the layers of debris left over from “The Big One” that fell in South America and wiped out half of civilization in the year 2525. Occasionally in the 2013 and 2014 layer they notice the remnants of underground bunkers used by some people calling themselves the “Doomsday Preppers”. It is not certain if these “Preppers” actually used these bunkers for shelter or if they simply built them as a form of ancient worship…. a temple to their creator that they called “Disk Cover E Dawt Calm”.

These future archeologists can only find such bunkers if the were located at the bottom of a hill that collapsed and covered them over in a mud slide. Since this happened only once every 30 years or so, very few bunkers are found intact and none have been found even close to the 2525 boundary.

Statistically, what does this mean? Does it mean that the Doomsdayers died out before 2525?

Maybe. But it could ALSO mean that we just haven’t found all the %^&& bunkers yet.

The probability of finding a bunker built AFTER the 2525 boundary would be zero. And even though we have records showing that many such bunkers were built before 2400, the likelihood of finding one of these bunkers AFTER 2400 is statistically very small because they almost never survived intact unless they were sealed in mud first.

Why is it so statistically improbable to find a bunker near the 2525 kill boundary? Because when we were digging around to find the other bunkers, we weren’t looking for a specific year. We just found one, and dated it by the age of the Madonna posters on the walls.

It’s like being in a crowd of 100 people. How likely it is that you will find someone in 100 people who share your same birthday month and day? It is reasonably likely. But how likely is it that the same person would be born in THE SAME YEAR, MONTH AND DAY? Much less likely. As you get more specific, your probability of finding a match goes way down.

So… finding dinosaur bones of no specific year is reasonably probable. You find a bone, any bone, and then figure out what year it come from. Looking for dinosaur bones of a SPECIFIC YEAR is like looking for a needle in a haystack… and that was what Dr. Gould’s point was. It was like looking for a “Dinosaur in a Haystack”. If he could find just a few T-Rex bones reasonably close to the drop dead date… that would be statistical proof that they existed right up to that date and did not die off gradually. And he eventually found a set of such bones.

I hope that was clear.

You have to think about it for a while.

Alex

Conflicted – I would have to take the 70 yr old experience. As a newer person to prepping, I am lacking the knowledge aspect. The ability to learn by osmosis from a mentor like that would be priceless and likely the difference between surviving and not. At the very least, its the difference between struggling to get by and really getting dialed in and getting ahead in a bad situation.

I will be 100% honest here.

As a single 37 year old male a young good looking 28 year old dude with a strong back sounds like a potential barrier to me finding my “Eve” to repopulate the earth with.

I don’t wanna end up being single the rest of my life.

I will take the 70 year old lady.

a lot of chuckles in this episode..

something I’ve been noticing about the status quo lately.. is that they only have one solution to every problem.. MORE!

I first started noticing it when my local government proposed to curb local governmental corruption by.. ADDING more government (‘oversight’ in the governmental vernacular).

But of course its everywhere. MORE currency for corrupt institutions wasting money. MORE teachers. MORE police officers. MORE pesticides. MORE herbicides. MORE jobs. MORE GDP. MORE debt. MORE consumption. MORE laws.. you name your problem, and we can solve it.. with MORE.

The joke of course is that if your taking an action that is negative, doing more of the same doesn’t reverse its effects.

Its like wanting to lose weight, so you double your daily consumption of soda from one six pack to two six packs.

Losing Strategy x 2 Winning Strategy