More than half of people in the United States may not be able to cover a $1k emergency expense from savings.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/01/19/56p...

While some of that effect is due to economic choices, much of it is not. It is difficult to prepare for a long-tail disaster when you're facing oodles of short-term needs.

It is just a matter of priorities and knowledge, and who is here on Hacker News reading what I wrote? Is it a population that can afford these suggestions or isn’t it?

There are plenty of people in the US who can barely scrape together enough to feed themselves for a day. Telling these people to just spend more money isn't helpful.

If you are fortunate enough to have a fixed location and are able to survive in general society, I can assure you, you can find some way to scrape together a rolling supply of beans and rice.

If nothing else, these are served in abundance at food banks. I should know because I have friends in some parts of the country who are homeless & regularly used food banks. They had no place to store long term stuff (although I have found buried caches before, I don’t know people who regularly do that) so my advice wouldn’t apply to them, but if someone went to a food bank and had a fixed location for storage, I am sure they would have no trouble being able to secure a large supply of rice and beans.

A large issue with poverty is it generates a mindset where these kinds of preparations are much lower priority than daily survival, so that would be a more reasonable reason to point at I think.

You sound like someone who is very privileged, who has not had to deal with the same circumstances that people who live on the Res have had to deal with. What's worked for you, an individual, in your own life in your own circumstances obviously doesn't work for these folks and just because you think you may know better than them doesn't mean you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately doing this so frequently, and posting so many flamewar comments, that I think we have to ban this account. These things are the opposite of what HN is for, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

As another comment pointed out, median income in Pine Ridge is $4k per year.

I don’t think really any of your advice is compatible with that income level.

Thank you for sharing all of these recommendations.

Remember that without power you have no exhaust fan and must ventilate appropriately.

A kerosene heater is a great investment in colder areas, hardware store sealed kerosene will last nearly forever.

Without that, the method for heating food I’d use is a propane stove. You can get a single burner for under $30. I always have 4, 5lbs propane canisters with me to cook while traveling. For a house, you can have a large propane tank.

I don't think you've run the numbers here, at all. Battery storage that can provide off-grid heat-pump heating for a single dead-of-winter design night is bordering on impractical. Creating a buffer that could last 3 whole days (4-5x the size) would be blatantly prohibitive.

Batteries only make sense for daily cycling to deal with the dark. It's much less expensive and most likely less environmentally destructive to supply longer term backup electricity needs from a traditional generator and dino juice than to manufacture batteries just to have them sitting around basically unused.

The sensible way to spend capital investment is on more insulation to make your heating load quite low to begin with (eg Passivhaus). Perhaps this dovetails into your thinking, but if so you should lead with and focus on that, as talking about supplying heating loads with batteries is just insane.

If you have solar, you won’t ever go 3 days without some energy generation. The 3 days of battery is mainly a buffer for night time when solar is offline.

I just think, at the very least, getting people thinking about these topics and perhaps even convincing someone to make some lifestyle changes could be really helpful, and well, it just isn’t often words from internet strangers could have such a direct impact.

Ultimately, my thinking is that I can’t help the people in that article here, but I can try and contribute to the readers in my small way.

That recommendation is for people with the money to do it, which is most of us here. I was replying to someone talking about most “rural” people and extended the reply to be relevant to people here.

Given I sleep most nights in a hammock in woods backpacking and travel around nonstop, and have no trouble in sub-zero wilderness, I have definitely opted out of housing and may or may not know something about what I’m talking about.

Believe it or not, people with ethics and willpower to follow through still exist. I have opted out of housing and opted out of having children, because the housing situation is unconscionable and refuse to participate in it (nor will I enrich people participating in it by paying their outrageous rates). I would never bring a child into this world as it is and where its going, so that is an easy one.

Okay, I do agree this qualifies as opting out of the housing market.

> Believe it or not, people with ethics and willpower to follow through still exist

Sure. I'm there myself on a few topics, and have lived them for quite some time. But you need to understand that this puts you at odds with 99% of society, and as such your example isn't going to be found as actionable advice by the sheer majority of people - even people who agree with you 90% of the way.

Do you mind sharing your numbers? If I just spitball with a 10kBTU/hr design load, a heat pump COP of 3, and assume that your heating requirements are taken care of by that design load for 8 hours at night, that's still like 3 Powerwalls. I'd say there are better ways to spend those resources, especially considering that batteries wear out like everything else.

All things told I was prepared to spend around $75k on electrical to make this happen in a remote location, which seemed reasonable to me given the capabilities & stability I would get in return. It is not something most people could afford, but most people here on HN probably could which is why I mentioned it.

For emergencies, I think I would put more trust in a low-tech wood burner, moving extra wood in-house whenever there’s a serious storm forecast.

Still, in general it seems like the ultimate design constraint is always low probability events adding up - eg solar generation getting severely cut for a week, due to snow on the panels and cloudy days or hardware failure, coupled with many cold nights in a row. For which a fall back to a more traditional denser energy source (wood or gasoline) that you'd end up using every few years comes in much cheaper than trying to oversize the primary battery storage to handle every long tail event.

What a thing to say.

The article is about the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, with >80% unemployment and average incomes of $4000 per year. I expect their notions of "very affordable" may not match yours.

You are getting a lot of flak for this, but I completely agree. For the salaries many on HN take home (well into the six figures) this should be far more of a priority. There is almost no excuse to not do it in any semi-rural setting - I see it as outright negligence if you make that sort of money and have a living situation that allows it.

You mentioned $75k previously - that would be for an extremely small house. I've also ran the numbers, and for $250-500k (depending on climate) you can basically live in a normal sized house and be completely off-grid indefinitely. That's a ton of money, but almost nothing when compared with a FAANG salary over a decade.

If that is a bit too crazy for you, you can get back to the ~$150k number by the simple addition of a backup generator fueled by on-site propane. Get a few tanks on-site and it's pretty easy to have a 60 day supply on-hand at all times when combined with your solar generation during the day. Propane doesn't go bad so you can basically store it indefinitely. Add in a wood stove and you really can go as long as your food and medical supplies last.

It's strange to me more folks in this position do not make this a priority. Just adding rooftop solar+batteries+roll-up generator seems to be too far "out there" for most people to even consider.

I've noticed since COVID these attitudes are slowly shifting, so we'll see what the future brings. The sheer number of friends I know who have less than a week's worth of food in the house and not even a little Honda 2000w generator is uncomfortable to me.

I realize a lot of good fortune and privilege allowed this which is why I can’t fault the poor folks in the article.