Category: Barbara

09:21 – The first thing many first-time visitors to downtown Winston-Salem notice is usually the old RJ Reynolds Building, which most of them probably assume is a small copy of the Empire State Building. In fact, the converse is true. The Empire State Building is a large copy of the RJ Reynolds Building, which was just added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The confusion is understandable, because the two buildings look identical except for size. In fact, many Winston-Salem residents call our building the Empire State Building. I wonder how many New Yorkers call their building the RJ Reynolds Building.

Barbara is due back late afternoon today. I still have lots of clean-up to do, so I’d better get started.

13:23 – Late afternoon indeed. Barbara called a little while ago from Statesville, about 30 miles down the road, to say they had just finished lunch and were on their way home. Colin and I are frantically cleaning and decluttering. I just finished cleaning the toilets, and Colin is in the hall bathroom licking the floor because I didn’t have time to mop it.

07:58 – Barbara just left on her trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. She’ll be back Monday. Colin and I will build some science kits, work on the prepping book, and watch Heartland re-runs.

When I walked Colin after dinner yesterday, we stopped to talk with Mary, Kim’s mom. As we were standing there talking, a loud argument erupted between the couple across the street from Mary’s house, something about who’d done what to whose computer. We could hear it through the closed door of their house. Eventually, Zakiah, the wife, came storming out the front door, followed by Bernard, her husband, with both shouting at each other. Then they both went back into their house, and I came home with Colin.

A few minutes after I got home, Mary called and said Bernard was at her house and had asked to use her phone to call the police. Kim was away at a nephew’s ball game, so Mary was by herself. She does very well for someone who’s 83 years old, but even so I could tell she was upset by what was going on. She told me to look out my front door. When I did, I saw four police cars parked in the street in front of her house and that of the bickering neighbors. So I told her I’d be right down.

Apparently, after I’d left the first time, the couple had gotten into a physical fight. Zakiah had stormed off with their four kids and driven away in her minivan. Bernard was injured. I’m not surprised, because Zakiah is a very large woman. She’s over six feet tall, and weighs more than I do. When I walked back down to Mary’s house, Bernard, with his arm in a sling, was standing there talking to three or four cops. I sat there with Mary in her living room until the cops put Bernard in the back of one of the patrol cars and everyone left.

This is not the first time the cops have been called out to that house. In the few months they’ve lived there, the cops have been out at least three times now. Bernard can regularly be heard bellowing at the kids, and a couple of our neighbors have said there were times when they nearly decided to call the police. Barbara says she’s had enough, and that these people don’t belong in this neighborhood. As I said to Mary, when Barbara and I argue, we do so indoors and at a low enough volume not to disturb the neighbors–as presumably does every other couple in the neighborhood–and we never end up with our arms in slings. Fighting in public like that is just infra dig.

10:03 – Barbara is due back sometime tomorrow, so I need to spend some time today getting the place cleaned up.

Here’s an argument I made 25 years ago, just when the federal government started to get serious about attacking tobacco companies and smokers. The truth about smoking – it saves the public purse a lot of money Logically, the government didn’t have a leg to stand on. If they were wrong about tobacco use adversely affecting the health of smokers, there were obviously no grounds to attack tobacco companies and smokers. If they were right, there were again no grounds to attack tobacco companies and smokers. If smokers indeed suffered early mortality, that meant they paid into Social Security much more than they could expect to receive, so non-smokers and the Social Security trust fund were the beneficiaries of those smokers’ actions. Back when insurance companies were still run by actuaries, which is to say rationally, people who smoked a pack a day or more of cigarettes paid slightly more for life insurance, just enough to take their expected earlier mortality into account. But smokers paid no more for health insurance than non-smokers (and should have paid less) because insurance companies understood that heavy smokers tended to die not only sooner but more suddenly than non-smokers, of illnesses that killed quickly and (from the health insurance company perspective) cheaply. If the US government acted rationally, they’d be encouraging everyone to smoke as much as they wanted to.

09:52 – Barbara called yesterday to let me know she was enjoying herself. When she called, Colin and I were smoking cigars, drinking bourbon, and watching the fight on TV. Later on, we headed to a strip bar for a boys’ night out.

Well, not really. Instead, we watched more episodes of Doomsday Preppers. The obvious goal of the series’ producers is to convince viewers that these people are crazy and stupid and, by extension, that anyone who believes in being prepared for emergencies is crazy and stupid. And there’s no doubt that many of their subjects are obsessed about dangers that are very unlikely to occur.

But many of them are concerned about potentially catastrophic events that have a much higher probability of occurring, for example an EMP event that takes down the entire power grid and transportation system. The man-made EMP event that many of them fear just isn’t going to happen, for both political and technical reasons. But a natural EMP event, a replay of the 1859 Carrington Event, is not only possible but inevitable. And, as Wikipedia says, “Studies have shown that a solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would likely cause widespread problems for modern civilization. There is an estimated 12% chance of a similar event occurring between 2012 and 2022.” I think that estimate is pessimistic. Such events occur, unpredictably but on average, every 400 to 500 years. That means that in any given decade, the probability of such an event is only 2% to 2.5%.

Similarly, another of their subjects, a San Diego physician, is preparing for a world-wide influenza pandemic. Historically, lethal pandemics occur on average about once a century. The last one was the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed 50 to 100 million worldwide, or 3% to 5% of the planet’s population. If a similar epidemic hit today, the death toll would be much, much higher, probably a billion people or more. In 1918, we didn’t have jet airplanes moving people around the world constantly, so transmission was limited. Nowadays, there are no such constraints on transmission. Essentially the entire population of the planet could be exposed to a lethal virus within literally a few days. We could have 50 to 100 million dead just within the US. On the other hand, the US and other first-world countries have much more capable public health systems than existed in 1918, which ameliorates the danger to some extent.

So, back-of-the-envelope, let’s guesstimate that the chance of such an epidemic occurring in the next decade is only 2% rather than 10%. That’s pretty comforting. A decade is a long time, and there’s only a 2% chance of each of these things happening during that time. The problem is, probabilities multiply. Looking at ten such potentially catastrophic problems, each with only a 2% chance of occurring within the next decade, we can calculate the probability that none of those will occur as 0.98^10 = 0.817. All of a sudden, things don’t look so rosy. An 18.3% chance of something terrible happening in the next decade is enough to scare most people. And if you look at 100 things each of which has only a 0.1% probability–one chance in thousand–of occurring each year, the probability that none of these things will happen over the coming decade is less than 37%.

My own SWAG is that the likelihood of something really, really bad happening during the next decade is perhaps 10%. My guess is that it will be a zombie apocalypse, so that’s what I’m preparing for. That way, I’ll also be prepared if something else happens instead. Okay, the truth is that I don’t believe zombies exist, so they’re just a placeholder for an unknown threat. What I really think is more likely to occur is civil unrest leading to a complete breakdown of the social structure in urban areas. That’s why I want to relocate to a small town in a farming area. I have an immense skill-set. I’ve spent the last 40 years accumulating useful skills and knowledge, but I don’t know how to farm, nor am I physically capable of doing so. So I’d like to live somewhere surrounded by people who do.