Dependency: You're going to miss me when I'm gone!
Yesterday was a weird day.
So I wake up hungover. I don't drink very often: maybe once or twice a year. I get drunk even less than that. But Sunday was a special occasion. I met a friend of mine in person for the first time that I've known on Discord/gaming for years.
Pretty weird meeting someone and recognizing their voice perfectly but having no idea what they looked like the whole time. I'm sure when I reveal myself to Hive I'll blow some minds. In any case, the girlfriend was not amused with me getting home at 2 AM when I said I would check in at 8:30 PM.
I think it was the White Claw that got me.
I had been drinking IPAs and then I was suddenly handed a White Claw. Hard Seltzer. Yikes. I had never tried them before and wanted to see what all the fuss was about as they've become pretty popular over the years.
I asked if White Claw was the new "Bitch Brew". Ya know, because when you talk shit about what people are drinking you gotta make sure and be sexist about it and throw in some toxic patriarchy into the mix.
Ah, Smirnoff Ice, those were the days, but I digress.
Turns out men don't like to be called bitches either so I was met with some resistance so this query. I drank my White Claw and my IPA, got out of the pool, and realized I was way too faded to drive my car even the 1 mile that was required. You know I hadn't even thought about walking until just now... that was totally an option. Instead we watched professional Starcraft games until we sobered up like a trio of super-nerds.
In any case my girlfriend was so irritated by the situation that we were dedicated to ignoring each other for the entire Memorial day, even though we scheduled in a day trip. However, Fate had other plans for us. I'm sitting on my computer trying to write my daily blog post and the power goes out and comes back on instantly.
Then I reboot everything and it happens again a few minutes later. And again. And again. Finally the power was out completely.
Apparently there was a pasture fire that lit two power poles on fire. Fun stuff. No power for you! Eat that 105 degree weather on a high-traffic 3-day weekend.
My girlfriend gets super triggered by fire because she grew up in a small mountain town where fires were an extremely serious and potentially fatal issue. So after all that we headed to Napa just to get out of the house and wait for the power company to get to it.
Power went out around 1 PM... Internets said it would be fixed around 4 PM. Napa took about 2 hours. Watched a TV show at a friend's house to kill the last hour. No dice. Power company says it won't be fixed till 3 AM. Then that eventually gets reduced to 11 PM.
Eh, no problem. Killing more time. Got some dinner. Yada yada yada. My girlfriend hates the heat so she was talking about just saying at our friend's house. I told a story about how I used to live in La Mesa with no AC and some days I would spray down my bed with water and sleep in a puddle because it was so hot (which would evaporate in like an hour). Good times.
Dinner was over and it looked like the power was back on, but no one with a working phone (0% power) could confirm. We headed back with our many many leftovers.
The power was not back on.
Boo!
Yeah so apparently back to the 3 AM target. The girlfriend was not having it so she took a cold shower. Apparently she only takes cold showers (who does that)? Crazy talk.
She even hates the heat so much that she did the thing and sprayed down the bed just like the story I told. Man, does she hate the heat. Back when we paid a flat fee for electricity they'd set the thermostat to 68 degrees in the middle of summer. Yeah, the landlord did not approve and made us start paying for our own power. Now we're at 75 degrees. Just a nice little lesson about being wasteful when resources are abundant.
Conclusion
Power came back on at midnight. Quite the inconvenience, but what are you gonna do? Oh right we should decentralize the power grid and everyone should have at least some solar. Right right.
The point is we are 100% reliant on society taking care of us and most people have zero respect for that. Power, Internet, gas, running water, food, shelter. We take these things for granted until they are gone. We need to decentralized our dependencies to avoid such systemic failures: even if the cost is high.
In another twist of fate, this also happened the day after I write a blog post saying I'm going to quit my job and go full time Hive. I missed my daily post yesterday: first time in quite a while. Just goes to show that multiple contingencies are important when making these decisions.
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Don't quit your job. Post at work! Use actifit or dappler to make it easy.
That is the point when everyone feel this
There will be no bad feelings in the world
The big takeaway from 2020 is that efficiency is fragile but resiliency is powerful. Any important lesson that most have not internalized.
Then again, decentralization has a serious handicap in efficiency. You need to carefully set the cursor or else you'll end up paying the equivalent of an "insurance premium" in order to stay decentralized.
Good point I think!
Ah, that sucks! I hate it when we lose power. Thankfully we have a generator, but it isn't anything big enough that we would be able to run our A/C. Sorry that your holiday weekend didn't go the best. At least you were able to get out and spend some time with friends. Hopefully that made up for it. I don't ever see a day I can quit my job and do Hive full time. I'm just too small.
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I loved this :)
I haven't heard from you in a while (cuz i haven't been here and now i am. long story. you probably dont' remember me. la la la) but I enjoyed this - a lot LOL
i kinda felt like - wait wait - did you finish about the meeting??? was that all??
but in the end - I felt like i giggled through enough to enjoy it all.
now i'm wondering if you actually write these often.
and now i'm gonna have to actually check it out and see!
hi again :)
Noticed the missed blog post...and I've only been following you for all of 2 weeks
We are experiencing record heat here this week and it is hot as hell. The AC in the main part of the house doesn't cool the office, but the office AC is loud and blows too hard, so in the extreme heat it's not as comfortable as usual. Although quite fine.
We are also deciding where to get out and if we should spend a couple of days away.
Fire danger here is also high.
Sounds like what your girlfriend needs is a good hug and apology for staying out late.
You will both be fine! ;)
I was talking about Smirnoff ice also the other day when friends were over and I was handed some random fruity wanna be in the same glass bottle and another label. Good times.
And no to cold showers, they must be volcano hot. LoL.
And ac is 70 right? LoL
we at 75 now
shit's expensive!
I think we are guilty of this for the most part. Given how our lives are, I get mad if power is gone for a few hours but I have heard of worst stories in the poorer undeveloped countries. So I really shouldn't be mad.
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Don't. There is no upside to doxxing yourself and one of the downsides with your bags being so heavy is that someone who recognizes you may set the IRS or worse on your ass. That has happened to several high earners on the predecessor platform.
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My thoughts exactly, never doxx oneself on the webs!
Get out of California. It's a sinking ship.
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At least it is a ship still in one piece. Hungary (my country) is a shipwreck in the bottom of the sea/ocean. Worst country in the EU. Dictatorship in the middle of the EU, and no one do anything about it. Shame.
Keep working, stop paying, and on any given tuesday we can drop the banksters in a lake.
I wonder what would happen if everyone would refuse to pay (and to be paid) for anything.
Well, wonder no longer.
This lays it out pretty explicitly.
If you want to see what most people out there are backing, this is it.
No need for the authoritarians to burn books, if they get folks not to read any.
I remember driving across the desert in Texas two years ago, right in the middle of the oil fields with the huge lumbering pumps moving up and down everywhere. Some of the oil wells gas off natural gas, and they haven't come up with a good way to contain and use it on site so they're required to just burn it off as it comes out of the well because the CO2 isn't as bad a greenhouse gas as methane. This got me thinking about how stupid and wasteful our society is right now. This was deemed the solution to free fuel just falling into their laps. Burn it. Don't use it for anything, just open burn it into the atmosphere. These are the kinds of wasteful legacy systems we're dealing with. This got me thinking about how centralized our grid power is, and that it was designed and built by the same kind of people around the same time as the oil infrastructure originally was. That single point of failure all but guarantees that it will fail catastrophically at some point. Kind of ironic that a couple years later that very place was ground zero for one of the worst grid failures in the history of the US. It's not all that hard to generate electricity, but it is very hard to build a large and complex system that services hundreds of millions of people that runs 24/7, 365 days a year, and never fails. When it does fail, especially during a time of harsh weather, it can bring society to its knees until it's back online. I also didn't realize just how centralized our oil infrastructure was until the pipeline hack, but it makes sense in hindsight. Long story short, I agree that we as a society definitely need to transition away from dependency on these mammoth centralized systems, and I think we can even get away with it being just as cost effective. If the amount of money for poured into decentralized power that gets poured into the grid, the economics would almost certainly work out.
Why is this post on Leofinance?
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It's a harrowing allegory about the importance of hedging.
Ha Ha :)
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I am waiting for it.
Really felt the story. And I agree about decentralized solutions - we should have them for everything so that eventually there's no need for the government to exist at all.
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To give you perspective, we get maybe 30 hours of electricity per week in Bayelsa, Nigeria and that's on a good week. There's nothing wrong, no fire, no hurricane or natural disaster, this is just life her.
Your "nightmare" scenario is a reality around here. We supply ourselves with power because we don't ever have it, water, security and everything in between. I can confirm to you that it is a nightmare and you don't want to decentralise it. Just appreciate what you have and find a way to make it better man.
Every time I read articles about people in the US complain about "bad things" it sort of makes me smile because it is a normal day here.
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Sounds like you'll be buying solar panels when you're a millionaire.
I also don't recall calling it a nightmare scenario.
It was a minor inconvenience, for me anyway.
lol Definitely. There's a cheap one I could get for a few hundred dollars.
The main goal is to exit this shit hole anyways. This is no way to live.
Sorry about the "nightmare" part. Twas hyperbole on my part.
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Mesmerizing and terrifying at the same time. The dependence that we experience today is like addictive dopamine, making us always want to feel it even if we walk without awareness. The most important lesson is don't take anything for granted.
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Wild stuff lol. I try to schedule a post or two in advance in the situation of something crazy like that happening so I don’t miss my daily post!
Bitches brews would always give me stomach aches and if I drank too many of them, the shits. I was fine with beers and stuff but whatever it was about those Smirnoff drinks, killed my stomach! I haven’t tried white claw yet but I don’t think I’m interested in that either lol. Glad you met a friend you gamed with for years! I got close to meeting one when I went on a road trip years ago, he was 3 hours away from where we were at but I wasn’t driving and he couldn’t easily meet up with us. Hopefully one of these days I’ll meet back up with him, he was an awesome dude.
Yep.
We are all very dependent. Time to take some pointers from a prepper 😂
It funny, that’s unusually hot here.
It’s weird that several people posted it was unusually hot where they live too. Hmmm a pattern? A weather pattern? No that would be like conspiracy theory stuff right? 😂
I am investigating Polygon.
It’s a rabbit hole, the more I read, the more I want to read.🤣
DeFi
If I sold my Bitcoin and ETH and put it all in Cubfinance I could replace my monthly income.
If this is the bottom, I will make more money then I did working.
But do I have the cajoles?🧐
This started as a comment, and now it’s like a post.
Truly
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