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

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

#251

Post by Retric »

zdragnar wrote: post #23
Retric wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t need them to burn for very long, cotton should have roughly the same energy density as wood by weight. Burning bags of cold clothes that don’t fit isn’t that bad of an idea. Negative teens is brutal, even a well insulated house loses a lot of heat if you want it comfortable but there’s a big range between uncomfortable and dead. -15f to 30f is the same difference as 30f and 75f.

> same energy density as wood by weight which means they'll provide a few minutes of heat at best. You'd be better off using them as blankets or letting some water freeze them into scoop shapes and turning them into makeshift shovels. They also aren't going to burn nearly as cleanly as wood, meaning the burn will be far less efficient. Depending on the size of area that you're heating, getting from -15 to 30F will ta…

It isn’t going to be clean burning, but the clothes are presumably bone dry which helps.

Really though it’s not about how good an energy source this is, but just how much old junk people have. I have seen people toss several hundred pounds of old clothes that don’t have any real value. It’s the same with old books they don’t burn that well but when you have a half a ton you might as well burn em vs toss them in a landfill.

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

#252

Post by citizenpaul »

Ntrails wrote: post #204
boomboomsubban wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans#G... Alcoholism rates among Native Americans is higher than most groups, which leads some to suspect a genetic reason. Currently, there isn't a ton of evidence supporting that idea.

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

[flagged]

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

#253

Post by PenguinCoder »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #209
PenguinCoder wrote: post #145

Earlier 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?

After stocking the woodstove and building the base, I get a wad of newspaper and put dryer lint in it. Then put the wad on top of the log pile right under the flue/exhaust pipe and light it. Then immediately light the rest of my kindling to get the fire going.

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

#254

Post by chasd00 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #83
chasd00 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We did it to them on purpose to wipe them out. "we"? I wouldn't be so presumptuous.

You did not. The society that you are a part of did systematically disassemble their society and slaughter any resistance. So “we” got our trains, oil and highways, and turned the Great Plains into one of the great breadbaskets of the world, at least for awhile. Unfortunately the depletion of the aquifers will leave those same plains a desert from an agricultural perspective in many of our lifetimes. Maybe when that…

Once again, you’re making a lot of assumptions about the person you’re replying to.

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

#255

Post by anigbrowl »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #165
nottorp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were studies 10-20 years ago predicting that global warming will bring with it completely unpredictable weather and harsher extremes in both directions.

Do any governments or institutions have a live(ish) updating model of "what would happen" if trends continue? People reference studies all the time but what's the currently accepted model/outcome in the scientific community? I remember hearing that melting of the ice caps will stop current flows in the ocean and bring about an ice age. Is that actually a thing or just fake news?

It's difficult, like the difference between knowing a car is going crash and being able to estimate how it will look afterward. You can (to some extent) access these models and try them out yourself: https://juliahub.com/ui/Packages/ClimateModels/dFyeI/0.2.15

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

#256

Post by lisper »

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.

Yeah, I'm not saying that this is actually true, only that it's not absurd on its face. As I understand it (and I am absolutely not an expert here) North American indigenous populations separated from Asians at the end of the ice age, i.e. ~10,000 years ago, and since then had no exposure to alcohol. That seems like plenty of time for genetic predisposition to alcohol tolerance to be reduced. So it's possible and worthy of serious consideration and investigation. Whether it's actually true is a completely different question, one where the jury is still pretty clearly out.

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

#257

Post by LarsDu88 »

lisper wrote: post #217
Ntrails wrote: post #204

Earlier 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

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 rum was quite expensive and typically mixed into punch water to bring down it's concentration. Mass production and lowering costs were what triggered the alcoholism epidemic and temperance movements of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Drinking in northern Europe does have a way longer and more entrenched history than elsewhere though. Colonial men women and children all drank watered down rum and beer which were more hygienic than water. In China, by contrast, half of the population gets Asian flush and cannot tolerate alcohol, and there is a strong traditional culture of boiling water and drinking tea!

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

#258

Post by ridgeguy »

phkahler wrote: post #184
aaomidi wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly what you’re asking but there’s also a concept of genetic trauma, where some traumas can fundamentally change your offspring. For example, your grandmother from your moms side technically made the egg cells that you were born from. That means that whatever your grandmother was going through could for example pass on all the way down to you.

>> For example, your grandmother from your moms side technically made the egg cells that you were born from. That can't be right. Grandma gave mom a single cell. Mom's ovaries with grandpa's DNA too produced the egg leading to me. Or is there some element I'm not aware of that make it more like stated above?

Look into epigenetic inheritance. This is a mechanism by which environmental factors cause inheritable modulation of genes, which themselves are unchanged. Methylation (attachment of methyl groups) of DNA is one such mechanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_i...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-018-0113-y

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

#259

Post by lazyasciiart »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #7

The 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.

> the drifts of snow have rendered their wood stockpile inaccessible

It mentions a family running out of baby formula. Baby formula is in short supply around the country and also very expensive - many stores won’t allow you to buy more than one or two cans at once and if you’re buying it with WIC funds then you can’t afford more than a month at a time anyway.

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

#260

Post by survirtual »

anigbrowl wrote: post #241
survirtual wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sounds like the people in this article could be snowed in for a week or more. Your experience and insights are interesting but you're kinda tripping over your own feet with generalities that are at odds with the article we're discussing.

I agree with you. I thought replying to the post I did and honing in on the statement about rural folks was enough to go on this tangent, but I will look towards being more focused on the root topic in the future.

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.

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