Day: May 28, 2025

Preparedness Notes for Wednesday — May 28, 2025

On May 28, 1937, the famed Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was opened to vehicular traffic. JWR’s Comments: Originally, the toll was 50 cents each way, or $1 for a round trip, with a 5-cent surcharge for any car with more than three passengers. The bridge toll is now $10 for automobiles, or $9.75 with a FastTrak transponder, for automated billing. Assuming 260 working days in a calendar year, that would equate to a bridge toll expense of $2,535  per year, for a Golden Gate Bridge commuter with a transponder!  By the way, additional incremental toll increases have already …


TEOTWAWKI Signals Intelligence – Part 2, by Mike in Alaska

(Continued from Part 1. This concludes the article.) I will devote the rest of this article to a USB “dongle” type radio receiver that I have on hand, and the amazing things you can do with it. I also intend to make mention of a device called a “Tiny SA” a signal analyzer that was made more for spectrum analyzing signals on the test bench but can also be used for SIGINT as well. The USB dongle I am currently using is the RTL2832U. This is a low-price unit costing just $40. But I do advise you consider buying the …


SurvivalBlog Readers’ & Editors’ Snippets

Our weekly Snippets column is a collection of short items: responses to posted articles, practical self-sufficiency items, how-tos, lessons learned, tips and tricks, and news items — both from readers and from SurvivalBlog’s editors. Note that we may select some long e-mails for posting as separate letters. — A fascinating video about Finland, and its preparation for near-future arctic warfare: Inside the Most Prepared Country on Earth. JWR’s Comment:  I’ve concluded that the reason Johnny Harris was given such great access to do this reporting was because Finnish officials could see that he had handled his previous reports on Switzerland …


The Editors’ Quote of the Day:

“It took more than 60 years between when the notion of Artificial Intelligence was first proposed and studied, and for us to reach today’s capabilities. Solving safety of superhuman intelligence—not perfect safety, safety in the sense of ‘not killing literally everyone’—could very reasonably take at least half that long. And the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges …