Quote from: RE on Jun 23, 2023, 08:36 PMThe fact I had a more comfortable early life than you and didn't busy myself braining raccoons with a Lousiana slugger is irrelevant, although I whacked my share of pidgeons , squirrels and rats with my wrist rocket slingshot in Rio and New York in the fun days of my privileged youth. 

And I'm sure they were quite tasty. And that the opportunity to live off the land in Central Park was a common training exercise in the halls of education for the sons of TPTB. What was the longest number of days in your early life when your family had no food? Was the answer to that question EVER larger than 1?

Quote from: REThe big floating eggs are designed precisely to avoid having to live out in the bush practicing survival skills and BBQing roadkill.  I'm no Cody Lundin or Eustace Conway, and even in my best years after wilderness camps I doubt I would have lasted long living the full primitive.

Practice certainly helps. And you get to practice alot when there is no alternative, as opposed to heading off to "camp". And I agree that your floating bubbles idea is a great place to park the lemmings in the world.I can see a conspiracy built around them as soon as the government would announce such a plan....you know the routine as it is common in the doom world...government rounds everyone up, tells them they get to live on these bubbles...and then thin the population easily when a storm comes along and suddenly the bubbles all sink in the open ocean, darn it, if only they had been designed better. So sorry, so sad, but hey, look! Population has been reduced by XX%!

Quote from: REOn the other hand, I'm darn good at wiring up parts scavenged up from auto junkyards to keep my EV wheelchairs running and modifying them to take trailers and lift me off the ground if I fall.  I'm a good plumber and carpenter and I've done a decent amount of welding, though that isn't a real strong point and I would need to mess with the equipment more to get really good at it.  I'm an expert chemist and know how to recycle and build batteries, do extractions from plants to make basic medicines , cleaning agents and preservatives, poisons and anti-toxins.  I know medicine and anatomy and I could put in a trach tube or set a broken bone, extract a bullet and sew up a wound, and if no doctor was around I think I could remove an inflamed appendix without killing the patient.    Keeping it from getting infected would be the biggest problem if good antibiotics weren't available, but we should start off with a good stock and could  work on making more, though we would need a good biochem lab for that.  I've never run a nuclear reactor but the principles are pretty straightforward and tidal generators are right up my alley.  So I think I would have been a pretty handy person to have around in the floating town, particularly since I'm designing it. lol.  Of course, I am talking about the me before I was 50, not the me of today.

So you are...handy? My wife loves it when I am handy as well. But unlike me you'd run for the bubbles, right? And then that sad accident comes along and..well..

Quote from: REWhile I have never bred any of my own kids, I've taught thousands of them and I had a full year of experience as a 10 year old, lol.

I am familiar with your teacher stories. I'm a parent. Parents are also teachers. And then they do the 80% of the work that matters even more...making children into competent adults and citizens. No real book on how to do that one, it is more of a lead by example kind of thing.

Quote from: REI was perfectly capable at age 10 on evaluating what I wanted to do....

As a parent, I don't believe that claim for a nanosecond, regardless of the opportunies provided to you via your family wealth.

As I said, we learned different things in our youth. You learned about being master a master of the universe by the age of 10. I learned how to survive without needing internet experts who lack experience doing just that to explain it to me. And then at 18 made a decision that I would rather live in civilization, the food was better, and it turns out that brains and the ability to deliver real world results could be quite lucrative. And I haven't ever had to eat ground hog as part of my diet since I left for college.  That alone made civilization far superior.