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Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

lcamtuf.coredump.cx

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Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#251

Post by geff82 »

I love this article, because in its essence, it does not prepare you for prepping as much as leading a solid life.

It is also one of the first articles about prepping with a positive tone. I personally do some mild prepping (as my mother always did herself). But I don't like to be associated with the "typical" preppers and stay clear of them, because prepping is no lifestyle that leads anywhere. I think prepping should be a side topic - to keep your good life good in case an anomaly happens.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#252

Post by dharma1 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #83
bupku5 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but "foraging" for water in an urban environment probably means stealing it

Possibly, but if that's what you need to do to survive you will. Finding and maintaining access to (aka defending) a water source is one of the most challenging parts of survival. Primarily because it locks you into a location if you let it and a quality source is a huge draw for populations - obviously. In scenarios where you're out of municipal water a few days like is happening right now in Houston (Myself and my…

portable water purifiers/desalinators are pretty useful, if you have access to any sort of water

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#253

Post by vixen99 »

oblio wrote: post #247
ciupicri wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Romanian villages and small cities have problems with flooding almost yearly. And there's also the risk of earthquakes.

If you're in Transylvania in a non-flood zone you should be in one of the safest regions on Earth, as far as natural disasters are concerned.

While, that is, the pretty regular small earthquakes in the Vrancea county that borders Transylvania, release the pressure! At least, I assume that's better than a long period of ominous silence - I'm not a geologist!

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#254

Post by quickthrower2 »

yourapostasy wrote: post #214
quickthrower2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic Queenslander house is built up high so it can stay cool and probably also good for a flooding scenario.

That's fascinating, thanks for the info; the Texas coast has some houses with a similar design [1]. While some use wood stilts, some are going into full fortified designs [2]. Even further afield, using principles established with invisibility cloaking research might offer even more protection in the future [3]. If plasma gasification-produced slag-based pozzolanic concrete can be proven safe and efficacious, then th…

Fun fact I met the author of #3. Nice guy.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#255

Post by twobyfour »

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #191

What's the point of living through the zombie apocalypse? I honestly don't understand any of this stuff vs the normal 3 days of water/food/etc thing. If shit's that bad, we might as well be dead. Why live for The Walking Dead?

Or you could just be stuck in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#256

Post by wwweston »

ckinnan wrote: post #250
yourapostasy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Literally right now, my good friends are being rescued from a rooftop in Houston. No number of bottles of water in their basement or generators are going to help them. Some of this outcome is a direct result of conforming to commercially-fabricated social pressure. In this particular case, floodplain maps are publicly and freely available, so anyone can build structures that rise well above the highest-projected fl…

Developers are just responding to market signals. The underlying problem in the U.S. is that the federal government backstops 98% of flood insurance policies and does not charge the actuarial risk price. This government subsidy gives people incentives to overbuild and underprotect property in flood-prone areas.

I like the idea that un-socializing flood risk pools might align incentives better... but my guess is that's not what would happen. Instead, by and large, people would estimate risk the way most humans do, which is to say "badly," and would value the premium money more than protection from events whose cycle is long enough that they seem like freak occurrences to some. If that's the case -- if that's been the case in the past -- then putting the government as the cause is putting the cart before the horse. It isn't that the market bent to the shape it's in because of the government, it's that the government adapted to the shape of the market and provided the socialized form of insurance that people were most amenable to.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#257

Post by PeterisP »

nebabyte wrote: post #135
Waterluvian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment got me thinking about some form of volunteer force of medics. Imagine if every 20th car that drove by had a government issued medical bag in the trunk and a driver guaranteed to have recent first aid and emergency training. And in return the driver gets some sort of tax break, or an HOV lane free pass, or whatever the appropriate incentive is. Surely some country has tried this out.

> Surely some country has tried this out. Most first-world countries are not obsessed with self-elevation and interest resulting from their own infrastructure breaking down Third-world countries might be more the incubator you're hoping for but they generally don't care what happens to the non wealthy (and the wealthy's FO plans there as with everywhere don't involve looting cars on interstates) So if I were to guess…

It certainly has been tried, and it's ongoing.

E.g. in much of Europe you're not getting a driving licence without passing a first aid+CPR course, and every car must have a first aid kit and a fire extinguisher.

Also, I recall that USSR had mandatory civil defence courses in universities - so everyone with a college degree, no matter if it's medicine or math, will have had a full semester of disaster followup & related issues; didn't USA have something similar during the cold war?

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#258

Post by rdslw »

KGIII wrote: post #148
13of40 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got 40 gallons of potable water in the garage that I can tap into in an emergency. In fact, most of us do...

I have an artesian well, solar, wind, and hunt/fush/grow most of my food. The neighbor has a small farm. I'm also very remotely located. It really isn't a prepper mentality. It's just how I prefer to live. Quite a bit could happen and my life would remain fairly unchanged. I don't have these things so much for what people picture as emergencies. I have them because they are pretty necessary to live here. We have fair…

Can you share your location +-300km ?

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#259

Post by brlewis »

tzs wrote: post #180
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I re-read the beginning and I didn't see anything about the points I raised. I think your point that overzealous people who as you put it: begin by shopping for ballistic vests and night vision goggles; they would be better served by grabbing a fire extinguisher, some bottled water, and then putting the rest of their money in a rainy-day fund. is right on point, but IMO that just says - hey don't be insane.…

> What they should have done is learned when to move or when to stay by: 1. Not buying a house in Houston and then 2. Gotten out well before it was imminent. The reports I've seen are describing the Houston situation as a 1 in a 1000 year flood. Does it really make sense to avoid a place based on the possibility of such rare events?

When you buy a house in a town there's some chance you may spend the rest of your life there. Even if the risk really is 1/1000 per year, it's still N/1000 per house.

And the risk may be higher than 1/1000 per year given how much motivation is out there to understate the risk and say that nobody could have seen this coming.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#260

Post by nl »

oblio wrote: post #248
nl wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central/eastern Europe is pretty good as far as disasters go. Natural disasters, perhaps. That region doesn't have a great record in terms of political stability, and often has the bad luck of being in the middle of a warzone though.

This a humongous generalization. There's about 1/10th of the region that was in a war zone in the last 70 years (Yugoslavia, Eastern Ukraine), and those wars didn't really concern neighboring countries. Regarding political stability, I'd argue that a huge part of the region was very stable for 40 years, under the Communist yoke :p

There's about 1/10th of the region that was in a war zone in the last 70 years (Yugoslavia, Eastern Ukraine), and those wars didn't really concern neighboring countries.

That 70 years (which is debatable!) maybe the longest period of peace in the area in recorded history. Possibly the peace of 1871 to 1914 is the only other alternative.

Here's a list of conflicts in Europe since 1945[1]. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union there were some conflicts. For example, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was in 1968 and was a reasonable major conflict.

(Note that I'm not claiming that Eastern/Central Europe is unique in this! Mostly densely populated areas are similar, and Western Europe scores only slightly better if you don't count revolutionary movements within the counties).

Regarding political stability, I'd argue that a huge part of the region was very stable for 40 years, under the Communist yoke

Yes, indeed this is true. As I note above the 1945-1990 period was very stable except for Czechoslovakia invasion of course. They were pretty lucky in Poland in the 1980s too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea

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