Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

argusleader.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 405 posts

Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

#341

Post by NorwegianDude »

dragoncrab wrote: post #49
xyzelement wrote: post #22

This triggered two thoughts for me. First, how much of a killer the cold is. We've moved on from "global warming" to "climate change" language but there are a lot of places in the world that would be grateful for a few degree temperature rise (such as Latvia where I am from). Today, cold kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, while "heat deaths" are limited to geriatrics in the "first world." Second, preparedn…

Heat is less likely to kill you directly if you aren't forced to do physical work without any protection. However, tens of thousands of square kilometers of agricultural land is turned to desert in Central Europe with every single degree the yearly average temperature rises. Droughts are decimating crops made for prices skyrocket even before the war in Ukraine. That has some harder to attribute but none of the less s…

That temperature drop sounds very unlikely. If you live in a well insulated home then you must have ventilation too, and that alone should replace the air inside multiple times each day.

Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

#342

Post by bsder »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #225
lisper wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very hard to tease genetic factors out from socio-economic ones, but IMHO it seems plausible that a population that has been exposed to alcohol for a long time (hundreds of generations) may have been better selected for higher tolerance than a population that has been exposed only recently (a few dozen generations, and with modern technology making selection pressure lower in general).

The evo-bio story of alcohol is confusing though, since fermentation has been present in East Asia as long as anywhere, and there's a large part of the population there that has the alcohol flush reaction. You could tell the story as like, alcohol puts pressure on a population to evolve better responses, and with enough time the flush evolves and that helps limit drinking. But that's pretty just-so.

> You could tell the story as like, alcohol puts pressure on a population to evolve better responses, and with enough time the flush evolves and that helps limit drinking. But that's pretty just-so.

The "alcohol flush" reaction seems to be genetically conserved in Asia because it gives resistance to rice pathogens not because it protects against "alcoholism".

Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

#343

Post by dinkumthinkum »

mynameishere wrote: post #78
eternalban wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly wonder if the native Americans were (destined to be) screwed even before Europeans set foot in Americas. They were behind a formidable technology curve and I truly wonder would they have fared better if Japanese or Russian (or possibly even Chinese) colonists (the closest geographic candidate colonists) showed up. Consider it as a thought experiment - something that's been popping in my head lately: under…

If migration from Europe (and I suppose Africa) hadn't been unrelenting, then the natives would have gradually built up a modern-ish, defendable civilization. Maybe. It would have required some centralization of government as well, to prevent the divide-and-conquer tactics used against them.

Is that serious? Behind the technology curve is a massive understatement. They were thousands of years behind in nearly every area of development.

Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

#344

Post by dinkumthinkum »

katbyte wrote: post #152
eternalban wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the question is precisely this: who would leave the juicy morsel of Americas on the table in the 15th-20th century historic range. The means and processes may possibly vary. Just to be clear, even today in 21st you will note there are many global actors that deny the very notion of a "universal human rights". I'm not European myself and definitely not defending what happened. But it seems to me that what happe…

What happened to natives in America was anything but an accident https://youtu.be/A5P6vJs1jmY

I think you are not aware of the way the word “accident” is used here, or you are using its misinterpretation as a jumping off point.

Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

#345

Post by mindslight »

survirtual wrote: post #221
mindslight wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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 t…

I’d have to find my notes on the topic, but if memory serves for the results, I was targeting 200kWh of battery with a ~1000sqft space. I can’t recall my calculations on the number of panels because I was later working on another design for mobile use with my car, but I do remember it being around $20k-$30k in panels alone to do what I wanted. Panel efficiency and price has gone down since then, so I would expect tha…

Well, I apologize for what I originally said because it seems you have seriously run the numbers out. On its own that still seems like a massive amount of battery for a single dwelling, but hard to put into context without other numbers (design heating load, electrical load, atrophy over time, oversized for slower wear, etc)

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.

Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

#346

Post by rayiner »

dragonwriter wrote: post #318
rayiner wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s about parent’s environmental exposure affecting gene expression in their children. The notion that this can be passed down over multiple generations, where the parent’s generation wasn’t directly exposed to the environmental conditions, is fringe.

Its not “fringe”, it is demonstrated as a thing which occurs. Some particular multigenerational effects may be controversial, speculative, or even fringe, but that multigenerational epigenetic effects exist is not at all fringe.

Confidently asserting that there is a generalized “concept of genetic trauma” that explains behavioral phenomena, as the poster did above, is not correct. The science on this is extremely limited: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenet.... And it gets invoked by non-experts to support a lot of fringe assertions.

Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

#347

Post by wizwit999 »

dragoncrab wrote: post #49
xyzelement wrote: post #22

This triggered two thoughts for me. First, how much of a killer the cold is. We've moved on from "global warming" to "climate change" language but there are a lot of places in the world that would be grateful for a few degree temperature rise (such as Latvia where I am from). Today, cold kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, while "heat deaths" are limited to geriatrics in the "first world." Second, preparedn…

Heat is less likely to kill you directly if you aren't forced to do physical work without any protection. However, tens of thousands of square kilometers of agricultural land is turned to desert in Central Europe with every single degree the yearly average temperature rises. Droughts are decimating crops made for prices skyrocket even before the war in Ukraine. That has some harder to attribute but none of the less s…

I mean it works both ways, e.g. thousands of sq km of Russia and Canada become would likely become fertile agricultural land.

Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

#349

Post by dang »

trs8080 wrote: post #281
survirtual wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very aware of the poverty here. I have met people on the roads and in the woods with some incredible stories & lifestyles. 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 i…

[flagged]

Please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack.

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 hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

#350

Post by blacksmith_tb »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #257
lisper wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very hard to tease genetic factors out from socio-economic ones, but IMHO it seems plausible that a population that has been exposed to alcohol for a long time (hundreds of generations) may have been better selected for higher tolerance than a population that has been exposed only recently (a few dozen generations, and with modern technology making selection pressure lower in general).

I think one thing to clarify here is that western Europeans have thousands of years of history brewing and drinking alcoholic beverages, but it was only in the past 250 years that heavily DISTILLED alcoholic beverages like whiskey at affordable prices became a thing. Have greater than 5 percent ABV in a beverage would've been a bit rarer preindustrial revolution I believe. Even heavily DISTILLED high proof colonial r…

As a long-time tea drinker it was a shock to realize that while tea is pretty good for you, historically its biggest health contribution has been in drinking boiled (or almost boiled) water, not those catechins or l-theanine...
Post reply on HN