Value, value, value...

I should really add craft skills to the list of tradeables... Just being able to create some minor bits and pieces... if you have a source of bamboo, willow, even palms, basket-weaving isn't such a useless skill to have under your belt. As plastic becomes unavailable, just having a sturdy way of carrying items is very useful. Making and repairing craft items is a skill in itself, and if others can't do it, you might as well...

I am trying to find a couple of non-electric (ie manually operated) sewing machines - ones with foot treadles, rather than a hand wheel. Although... a little bit of ingenuity, and that isn't an insurmountable, just one that would require more work to adapt in the short term - for less hassle in the long.

I get to the subject of sewing machines because of reading one of Richard Feynman's books; he was a physicist, winning a Nobel Prize amongst others, and a social commentator. Apparently, he had a habit of touring the poor areas when he was visiting foreign countries. On one tour, I cannot remember which country, the taxi driver (ethnically African), showed him two women (ethnically Indian), who had bought a sewing machine and were doing quite well doing small repairs. His driver asked him why Indians in the country were doing well, while Africans were doing well. Feynman hesitated, not wanting to be a racist, but eventually gave the opinion that culturally a group that placed value in hard work rather than luck (or words to that effect) were more likely to succeed in the long run. The driver agreed, and said that he was going to buy his own taxi and really succeed - once he won the lottery... The point of the story is that you can't depend on luck for success - you have to do a lot of hard work.

If you want to succeed PSHTF, a lot of preparation and work is required - you can't rely on luck.

Creating value...

I've been listening to a lot of talk recently amongst survivalists, preppers, and the like, on what to stock up on, when preparing, for purposes of trade afterward. Food, water, ammunition, many things have been discussed. Popular are high silver coinage, or ones with a recognised gold content.

What you would need obviously depends on what future you expect, how many people are around - and what mood they are in...

I would think, though, that the best thing to trade is something you don't lose when trading, and something that is much more valuable with people wanting you to stay alive rather than killing you...

Traditionally, that means skills... Medical ability, trade skills... things that people can't take off you, things that someone would lose if they kill you - effectively making you, to use the words of economists, a non-fungible. Anything that means that you could not be easily replaced.

A strong pair of hands is not enough - there would be enough people willing to dig furrows, cart water, cut firewood, or similar, PSHTF - office workers or business people who can work well within a post-industrial civilisation, but have few skills otherwise. Hunting, as well as the requisite skills at dressing, are fine when there is enough game to make it worthwhile - and you have enough skill to support yourself.

This is assuming your plan isn't to take what you want by force...

The next best, possibly, would be to get things of little value, or that you can be paid to remove, processing, and then selling back. Case in point - urine. Even into the 1850s, urine was a valuable product - you can ferment it into ammonia, process it for phosphorus... Apparently, it also makes a good fertiliser when mixed with wood ash, possibly through a reaction between urea and potassium carbonate. You could do a lot, with some chemistry knowledge, although the smell is a problem. And it's not that long ago that night-soil men (as they were called) went around, generally improving life and hygiene. Getting rid of that, finding some use for it may be another issue - methane, perhaps.

Value is in the eye of the beholder... I'm trying to learn a little bit about native food plants - or even plants that don't look like food, especially to the uninitiated - and known medicine plants. Tea trees (as in the oil) are good - but steam distillation extracts the useful components. Camphor plant is a weed, but the chemical camphor has use.

The final suggestion that I would have is something of moderate value, which you can make even more valuable. Fruit is good, but you can only store so much before it rots (or have only a certain amount of ability to preserve), but fermentation (and even distillation) gives you something much more easily stored and traded...

The limits of growth

Interestingly, an Australian entrepreneur has taken pains to point out that unlimited growth cannot happen in a closed system, and that we should stop acting like it can...

Sustainability is a key to long term prepper survival - you have to operate on limited resources, doing much with little, not relying on being able to just get new items off the shelf (or equivalent) - and must be able to reuse what you have...

You have to plan ahead...

If you were low on food, and found a couple of chickens, would you eat them? Or would you keep them safe, eat some of the eggs, allow some to hatch, and try to find ways to have your new food supply last as long as possible? A quick feast might fill the belly, but a few days later you're back to where you were; at least if you are hungry a few days longer, you secure your future.

There are a few other, large scale business leaders who are coming around to this thinking, forgoing short-term profiteering, in exchange for the possibility of something better...

The Font

As the cliche goes - I've said it before, I will say it again...

Books are good... Well, many books are... I've been slack recently with increasing my library. It still happens, but if you get a book that covers a lot in a particular field, unless you need more detail, you don't need lots... Plus... If you get to the stage where your personal library is needed to help rebuild civilisation, you don't need a lot of depth and a single subject... Better to get depth on a couple, and breadth on many - Jack of all trades, master of a couple.

I've found that my collection is too small when it comes to veterinary medicine - and a little short for human medicine - so they're both on the list... I could do with a few more books directly aimed at recreating... but...

The problem is - Human History is, has been, and probably will always be about Trade.

If we were hit with a cataclysm that took us backward a couple of centuries - we'd have the knowledge on how to rebuild, but would we have the raw materials? How much processing is involved in all the "raw" materials that come to hand... if you build electronic equipment, the individual parts come from elsewhere. If you build the parts - the material for the parts has to be found... Exotic techniques might be able to be cobbled together, but do you know a local source of Indium that you could mine? Or, let's face it, Gold? Copper isn't easy to come by, but at least you'd be able to pull it out of destroyed houses, wires and cabling, but then what?

Tin is a very important metal historically in various alloys - but do you know where to get it from? At least Middle Eastern traders two thousand (and more) years ago could get it from England... Two thousand years ago, trade routes did span from Asia through to Europe, and at least part way into Africa...

Sulfur is a very useful element for making other things, but you tend to find it more in volcanic areas. Which reminds me - I have to find alternatives for catalysing ethanol into diethyl ether - from alcohol to anaesthetic.

Logistically speaking, TEOTWAWKI is going to be a bitch...

Efficiencies aren't efficiences...

I got into a, let us say vigorous, discussion the other day. A few of us were talking about generators and energy requirements... A few people piped up that they quite happily had five kilowatt generators, which can quite readily run their houses. I pointed out that my standard load is barely 500 watts - which was scoffed.

But the discussion got me to thinking - would I want a large generator to see me through a cataclysm? Generators require fuel - and maintenance... Efficiencies aren't efficiences, when you think about it - the technology required to get a two or three percent more power out of anything may make the difference between easy to repair at home, and impossible. If your PSHTF power supply takes more to keep running than you can do, is it worth having?

A fifty year old generator that doesn't need much to keep going is significantly better... A steam engine with external combustion maybe even better - okay, you don't get as much power out of the same size, but... for the want of a nail, the war was lost...

The apocalypse might not be televised, but will be really well attended...

...PSHTF also. It's surprising, sometimes, about who regards themselves as a survivalist/prepper/what-have-you. There are plenty of your stereotypical types, but every-so-often some big name will announce that they're worried about TEOTWAWKI, get a lot of publicity... Usually along the lines of "Have they lost their final marble" in tabloids, but... Of course, occasionally, there are those whose statements are in-line with their particular area of expertise - the number of well-respected economists currently going "heads-down, take cover" is well above background levels.



Of course, it does make me wonder how many of these are planning to not survive, or just have them and their immediate family survive... Philanthropy goes a short way... On the other hand, do you have to help someone who refuses to help themselves? Or, at least, refuses to try to help themselves?

I also wonder how many of these people actually prepare for afterward? Stored food lasts only so long; the best way to store seed is to have some of it growing as crops, storing some, replanting some, rotating  the old seed stock out. How many have a small library of books on a reasonably wide range of subjects, technical and scientific. And some art books - I am not so much of a philistine that I do not see value in art for improving the human condition.



There are many ways the world could end, or at least receive its catalyst... A large solar storm hit the Earth a few days ago, fortunately not large enough to cause damage to our electronic society, but what would happen if one was? I know that a large amount of my work-space would be useless - so many electronics parts made useless (possibly)...

But we still prepare, we still try to not provide too much publicity to what we do.

Game theory, really... If lots of people took prepping seriously, it wouldn't be a problem to let everyone know that we did - however, because everyone doesn't announce their plans, it's better that no-one does. Of course, that assumes everyone is rational, and that they are no people who'd try to take advantage of the situation... then again, game theory does allow for that.

I got ordained a few weeks ago. Not that I'm religious, or anything other than an atheist - it's very handy to have by the side... I need to find a few people, create a religious order based around accruing prepping and keeping knowledge alive.

I've also managed to order a copy of a book that I've known of for well over a decade and a half - I only need the one chapter, but it's worth having the rest of it as well. The book is on catalytic chemistry (I wrote that I like to accumulate knowledge) - the particular chapter of interest involves how to create a zeolite (a particular family of crystal) that will convert ethanol (drinking alcohol) to heptane and octane (aka petrol, gasoline)... Of course, obtaining the raw materials to create this may be difficult PSTHF, which means stockpiling, finding in-ground mineral sources, or chemically making the precursors out of rawer materials.

The problem is that most of our technology involves a very long manufacturing chain... Maybe have the religious order also try to improve some of the manufacturing chain problem. Which gets back to funding - while this world exists, it's difficult to tear oneself away - you need to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, which doesn't give you much time to do all the other things that need to get done...