Earlier quoted context omitted.
And three days is nothing when you could be without power for a week or more.
That statement was in a context of a paragraph about solar for wealthy people / upper middle class on a site with tech people who, coincidentally, near universally fall in that category. 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.
Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
241–250 of 405 posts
Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
>All you needed was to shovel like 20 meters of path and maybe a wheelbarrow. According to the article some of the areas are getting 30 inches of snow and ice! With drifts easily doubling that, I could see how 20 meters could quickly become near impossible to clear by hand, especially while it's still coming down.
Snow drifts can go 20 feet or higher with no place to shovel the snow to
Hardship breeds creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention (except under excessive government intervention, which may be at the root of reservation problems).
Maybe if we could calculate the present day market value of all the land the US government stole from the Native Americans (I've heard we broke nearly every treaty we signed with the Native Americans... to our shame), that could be structural payments to encourage entrepreneurial activity on the reservation
Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I knew about the alcoholism rates, but had always assumed it was a socio-economic / situational driven thing. I understand that historically it was used in some sense to control and indeed damage the Native Americans by the colonists? To what extent alcohol was completely new etc I do not know
>To what extent alcohol was completely new etc I do not know Kind of a tricky question that is somewhat covered in my link. Alcohol was definitely brewed in the Americas pre-Columbus, but by the seventeenth century alcohol was largely unknown to the Natives interacting with the colonists.
Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
#244The real story here seems to me to be not that people burned their clothes to stay warm but that people in a place with fragile connections to the outside world had so little in the way of supplies to weather a relatively short period without food deliveries. I'm not blaming them, I assume that many of the affected people don't have the resources to keep a buffer stock.
They cannot afford to stockpile fuel. I listen to a podcast by a man who grew up on that reservation. While he was back visiting his grandmother, a propane truck was filling her tank. He told the driver, "Whoa! Stop! We can't afford that much!" The driver told him, "Don't worry, it's free. Venezuela is paying to fill everyone's tank." Those propane tanks are mostly empty unless Venezuela is paying (before Venezuelan…
Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
#245[flagged]
Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
They cannot afford to stockpile fuel. I listen to a podcast by a man who grew up on that reservation. While he was back visiting his grandmother, a propane truck was filling her tank. He told the driver, "Whoa! Stop! We can't afford that much!" The driver told him, "Don't worry, it's free. Venezuela is paying to fill everyone's tank." Those propane tanks are mostly empty unless Venezuela is paying (before Venezuelan…
It looks like that program was halted in 2009 due to oil prices increasing dramatically, not due to sanctions.
Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a reservation and they’re the natives there. And the average is quite young, so I think everyone who can escape does (which can harm the remainder in other ways).
I spent time in ND, SD and MN matching online and phone wagering with receptive reservations. IMHO if you want to escape the res you gotta go far far away. Think 1000 miles. The racism in the Midwest is so entrenched that they solved the who!e uncomfortable mingling with people you hate thing by COMPLETELY excluding natives from society. The amount of times I saw natives bounced just for walking in to a bar in Fargo…
I was able to work with members of the Ute and Navajo tribes in Four Corners years ago when our company worked on reservation lands and was required to hire a percentage of local laborers. Those guys worked as hard as the rest of us out in the July sun down in the hot canyons. They laughed at and with each other poking jibes at each other since their tribes were traditionally not allies. It was all good-natured ribbing and I'm sure they knew each other or of each other before working with us. They worked the length of our contract in the area and had few issues with attendance or effort.
Local whites always talked down about the natives but I found them to be as dependable as Mexican and central American immigrants (legal or otherwise) that I worked with in Texas and other states. These people needed jobs and were willing to work to keep a job and the quality of their efforts was on par or better than the quality of local labor.
In contrast, our company cycled through local non-native help. Many of those people appeared and worked long enough to earn a paycheck and then disappeared. Some even played the employment game where a group of friends hired out to each of the three non-local companies and on any given day your rolls would show all of them working with one of your crews, some of them with one of your crews, or none of them with your crews that day. They went where they thought the best pay opportunity of the day would be and had a friend sign them in where they were expected to be so they could earn a check there too. This went on for weeks until one of our crews had a problem in the field and in the process of sorting it out and looking for a scapegoat, they went through the rolls of potential crew members who should have had responsibility and discovered that several people listed as being present and working did not show up at all.
Since the three companies were in the same business and everyone knew everyone else our party manager had a talk with the other guys and they compared employee rolls and discovered all the overlap and the system of sign-ins. All of those people were fired immediately when they showed up for their next day's work. These were ordinary white guys who all lived in that area.
Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't discount using dryer lint and left over cooking grease as a starter. I have a woodstove at the house, and I use both to get it going. Left over bacon grease on a few paper towels with dryer lint around/on top of it, and a few smaller pieces of soft wood like pine. Larger/heaver wood on top and behind it like oak. Make sure to also pre-heat the exhaust vent pipe, get a draft of air going.
> Make sure to also pre-heat the exhaust vent pipe, get a draft of air going. How does one do that?
Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd say most people, even in rural areas, don't have a supply that'll last longer than that, except for some hardcore preppers. I disagree. Or, at least where I live (densely populated europe), nearly everyone with their own house has at lease one (small) fireplace with some wood stored outside, typically enough for at least a month (otherwhise, do you go shopping wood every week?). Food-wise I agree that 8 days ma…
Enough for a month of what? Small decorative fires part of the day, or fires large enough to heat the house and cook food on 24/7? The fireplaces I’m familiar with would never heat the entire house, no matter how much wood you had outside.
Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, why aren't these people self sufficient after we took away all their means of self sufficiency? It's a real big mystery isn't it.
>Yes, why aren't these people self sufficient after we took away all their means of self sufficiency? This sounds very much like "racism of low expectations". "These people" are just as self-sufficient as any other group of modern people of similar socioeconomic background. It's been 100+ years since they were mistreated in any serious fashion. I come from eastern Europe and 150 years ago most of my ancestors were se…