Less crazy folk? I can't tell you many "less crazy folk" believe the most nutso easily-disprovable bunk on the internet because it reinforces their feelings and beliefs on something... Completely functional people making great money or running successful businesses or raising great kids, just totally believing whatever bunk makes them feel good. It's not about "crazy", it's about people just not being willing to investigate something further than what they believe, and trying to convince them of the "less crazy" way just won't budge them if they don't want to budge.
Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
291–300 of 340 posts
Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're missing his point. He's not saying he expects everyone to do this. He's just saying when to move or not move is often more important than any other considerations. Note that he included as an option leaving well before the storm hit. And there was plenty of warning on this storm.
Exactly, there is no reason anyone should be on the roof of their homes in Houston other than inability to heed warnings and read a weather report.
The governor told people to leave. The mayor told people to stay. One of them isn't going to be reelected next term...
Probably what should have happened (I'm using my perfect hindsight here..) is they should have told people living in low-lying areas to either go live with relatives or friends who were on high ground, or leave town altogether. And everyone else to stay. This would have prevented the mass exodus that clogged roads during previous storms, but gotten more people to safety.
Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
#293A 10 AM Bay Area earthquake is the highest plausibility * severity event you're likely to experience around here on a day to day basis - leaving some people with a 25 mile commute back to a structure that might or might not be standing, intermittent at best communications, and potentially impassible roads. IMO if you don't have a case of water, a road map, and a change of walking-around clothes in your car around her…
> you can drink the water even if there's not an earthquake you should rotate stock like that anyway to prevent it from unknowingly going bad
Sorry, but water goes bad? Or would it be that chemicals in the container dissolve into the water? Water itself going bad is news to me...
Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should add an sillcock key set for water access... they're handy. http://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-4-Way-Sillcock-Key-UWP0002D/2...
As someone else posed, "access" meaning looting?
Sillcocks are just a fancy name for hose faucets of the outside of buildings. If those still have water municipal water is likely still working so it's the most minor bit of stealing I can think of.
Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
#295The major thing overlooked here is mindset. After 14 years in the military and experience with several armed conflicts and humanitarian disasters, I have seen that pretty much all your plans and preparation will go out the window, so you need to learn to move adapt and improvise. If you're going to survive any contingency scenario you need to be resilient, excruciatingly innovative and mentally tough. Think more like…
> In reality you need to find or create a small community of survival minded people that can work together successfully over a long period with a variety of skills. Neil Strauss (the Rolling Stone writer) wrote Emergency where he documents his tour through prepper-dom. Slight spoiler here, but he ends up coming to the same conclusion you do in your last sentence. He took CERT (community emergency response team) train…
Yes CERT is great, my immediate family are all CERT members and I'd suggest it for anyone.
Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't studied it beyond recognizing that people who I have seen in a bad situation, and then subsequently saw them as one of a few remaining survivors, were either the first out of some place before a shit storm, or found a way to bunker down and wait for help while everyone else got lost/killed/starved.
Isn't that just survivor bias? Those people who survived when most people died were the ones who didn't do what most people did. But most of the time in life, most of the people survive and it is the few who don't.
Ha I think this is one of the few cases where survivorship bias might not be a bias.
Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tiny tornadoes... nowhere even close to the scale and frequency of midwestern twisters. Snow? A minor inconvenience, at worst. It's a frequent enough occurrence that municipalities are we set up to deal with it. If you don't have snow tires, there will be maybe 24-48 hours per year that you won't want to go driving (with snow tires, that timeframe is an order of magnitude less).
The difference between a tiny tornado and a big tornado is immaterial when your house is in the path. There were at least four times in the twenty years that I lived in upstate NY that snowstorms caused power outages and impassable roads at the same time. You can't just name one place as safe from natural disasters and then explain that the two natural disasters that they get there don't count.
Tornado threat may be sufficiently mitigated just by digging a [dry] hole in the ground, and getting into it whenever the sirens go off. If you have enough money, you can bolt a steel box to your foundation and hide in that instead.
We can actually build structures that can withstand [the most common] tornadoes, without adding too much to the cost of construction. Basically, monolithic concrete shell structures over inflatable forms are effectively "tornado proof", without additional engineering.
The nasty natural disasters in the Midwest are not just blizzards, but freezing rain storms. A coating of ice an inch thick on everything is guaranteed to take down trees and power lines, and make all roads completely impassable. You get up to a week without civilization. For example, if your furnace catches fire, you can call 911, and later find out that the first fire truck they sent out slid off the road into a ditch on the way to your house, and the guys that finally showed up two hours later were the second truck, sent over from the next township (true story). On the Great Plains, it's drought and brushfires. You get to spend a season watching everything turn brown, and then your town burns because some jackoff threw a cigarette butt out of his window on the highway, or because lightning struck the wrong spot.
Thanks to modern meteorology, tornadoes are just much less a threat than they used to be. They might pick off a person here or there every season, but when they do, there will always be neighbors around ready to help. They just don't wipe out an entire city, leaving everyone essentially on their own, because they are all (sometimes literally) in exactly the same boat.
And that's exactly why I am comfortable living in an area where the major natural disaster threats are tornadoes and flash floods.
Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 S…
The invasion of Czechoslovakia was relatively bloodless - compare with 1956 in Hungary.
Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> very sane people like Musk, Hawkings, and Gates Ehhhh... those folks are smart but none of them would make a top 10 list of the sanest people according to me. > It's not the cliche SkyNet or Ghost in the Shell stuff per se. For example, automation and how it's effecting the economy really does matter Sure, but this sounds like a cop-out in context.
Yeah sane wasn't the best word for those hypomaniacs, but you got what I meant - they are not irrational tin foil hatters. Why does that sound like a cop out? Economic decline, the U.S. erosion of the fundamentals of a quality life, overpopulation / too many dependents and not enough young workers, etc... those are all valid reasons to prepare. As is preparing for car accidents, sudden layoffs, floods, and so on.
Yeah I get your meaning.
And maybe this is silly and unfair, but to me "AI" in the context of prepping suggests very particular things. What you're describing should probably be called "social unrest" or "revolution" caused by displacement of labor.
Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk
#300The 'prepping' phenomenon is an expression of the extreme individualism (or less graciously, ego-centrism) of our time and society. Rather than assuming that society will come together in a crisis and help each other out, we need to become an army-of-one, stocked up for every scenario and armed to the teeth against dangerous others who are undoubtedly coming to take our shit. It's sad. I honestly think this another e…
You're basing that on some outdated stereotypes.
Lots of preppers do it because they want to be able to help their community in a crisis. They also actively work to prevent the disasters from happening in the first place. Being prepared in case they do is just a smart hedge.
Here are two quotes from one of our posts about why people prep:
Debbie W. from Liberal Preppers says, “I want to develop — and share — skills that are useful to the community at large, that increase the likelihood of the community as a whole prospering in adversity.”
Kevin R. told us that he believes “the movement is expanding from the traditional stereotypical prepper to non-white, non-cisgendered people taking more responsibility for their self sufficiency, taking control of their lives, learning skills and obtaining tools to take care of neighbors as well as their immediate family.”