My top reason for not relocating is that I'm working on preventing this kind of bad outcome, which I think I can do most effectively from Boston.

But even if I were doing work that could be done from anywhere, I don't think I'd relocate: that only helps in a small fraction of the doomy futures, I think there are also a lot of good futures, and I really like living in Boston.

I would be pretty surprised if things failed in that particular way? We do legally own the entire house, and that wouldn't be in dispute. Having money left on the mortgage means that we owe money to the bank, secured by the house. In most kinds of kind of disaster, if ownership becomes unclear, I expect it to be primarily resolved by possession.

I think things are unlikely to fall apart in this particular way, but to the extent that they do, I think it mostly argues for renting over owning, over being an absentee landlord.

The full list is on our donations page. Lately we've been prioritizing political donations (argument, mechanism).

As per your comment on LW, biorisk is a large proportion of the risks in the next 2 years. Are you personally preparing to protect yourself and family from mirror bio or to relocate?

On mirror biology, my impression is the risk there is mostly more than two years out, because it's really very hard. Do you think this specific biorisk is coming sooner?

On relocating, I don't think it would make sense for us to move in response to a bio incident. Instead, I'm more focused on preparations we can take at home.

Of these, (1), (5), (6), (7), and (8) have the form "X is important, figure out how to get countries to have X in an emergency". This is good, but I think for each of these you should also strongly consider figuring out get your own household to have X in an emergency. Since you likely care about your own welfare several times more than that of strangers, these are typically worth doing even at current prices (and each person who sees to their own household makes the world marginally more prepared):

(1) PPE stockpile: You Should Get a Reusable Mask. You have the advantage of not needing to organize a distribution system.

(5) Cleanroom bedrooms: you have the advantage of being able to use non-improvised materials, like air purifiers and far-UVC.

(6) DIY Respirators: you don't need these if you Get a Reusable Mask.

(7) Particle monitoring: you can get one for ~$70

(8) Food stockpiles: Store Food

Also, if anyone in your household seems likely to create mirror life, probably good to address that.

Fortunately, however, DIY solutions that use abundant materials (e.g., fans, filters, tape, blankets, vacuum cleaners) have a good shot at working. Slapdash preliminary tests by colleagues, using just tape and towels, have already attained a ~30x reduction in the hardest-to-filter particle sizes.

This sounds like so much fun to work on, non-seriously tempted.

Existing particle counters typically cost thousands of dollars, generally aren't designed for stockpiling or in-respirator wear, and have no manufacturing plan suited to a crisis ramp-up.

The cheapest ready-to-go option for DIY work today is probably the Temtop P600, which I see as $70. While I haven't tried it, it's a stripped-down version of the Temtop M2000 which is what I bought several years ago to use for DIY experiments.

Professional grade ones are better in various ways, but the big one is that they are calibrated. The cool thing is, for many kinds of experiments you don't actually need that! You just need some number that is (at least within a known concentration) linearly proportional to pm2.5, which an uncalibrated meter can do. For example, if you're trying to see how quickly something can clear smoke from a room you don't need to generate a target amount of smoke or know exactly how much smoke you've generated: you can just measure the half life. This gives you relative efficacy directly, or CADR if you have a sealed room of known volume.

If you want to make something cheaper, you can get a PMS5003, which I see as $21, and connect it to a cheap SoC (~$10) or to an Android phone (adapters in the $15 range). At scale I think you could get this down below $15: a PMS5003 or clone at high volume would be ~$7, the phone adapter would be under $1 at this scale, then a box, assembly, and some QC.

But all this is for in-room measurement, good enough for measuring rooms. Measuring non-valved respirators is way harder, because you need to get the sensor inside the mask. State of the art for quantitative fit testing involves poking a hole in a mask, which means you can't do it on an ongoing basis. I don't know if wireless is practical with current tech: getting a particle counter sufficiently miniaturized seems super hard. Building respirators with a test port could also work? (For a valved respirator you can measure how clean the air coming out of the valve is.)

I'm not very familiar with the situation in Nigeria, but my understanding is there's a lot of dust in the air much of the year from the Sahara, plus in Lagos and other cities there's a lot of pollution, is that right? In that case I wouldn't recommend UVC at all (since it inactivates pathogens but doesn't touch dust or pollution). Instead, something filter-based would have much broader benefits: dust and pollution in addition to pathogen control.

In the US the cheapest filter option is generally as Corsi-Rosenthal box (a box fan plus HVAC filters, both commodity items here). In Nigeria, something commercial would probably be cheaper since those aren't everyday items. Looking online a bit, maybe the Acerpure Pro P2 at ~₦120,000 for 191 CFM CADR is best? While that's a lot cheaper than the Aerolamp, though, that's still out of reach for someone at ₦70,000 / month.

(Minor: the Aerolamp also uses Care222)

Is this run by Aerolamp or someone else?

My external post probably would have been better with some explicit comparisons, but my claim is that in-duct UVC (a) isn't widely applicable, and so the overall potential benefit of pushing for it is low and (b) isn't cost effective even where it's applicable.

I think (b) is the more important one and where we most disagree. I've now added the cost-effectiveness calculation to the end of https://www.jefftk.com/p/against-in-duct-uv and it looks to me like even in the best case in-duct is much more expensive per CADR than filters or far-uvc.