Stupid question: why would you fill up your bathtub?
Probably to quickly stock up on drinking water.
What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
21–30 of 381 posts
Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
#22Stupid question: why would you fill up your bathtub?
Having a reserve of potable water.
Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
#23I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war. First, I'm going to press send on the doomsday draft which is sitting in my e-mail. Second, I'm going to go to youtube and play "We all go together" by Tom Leher. Third, I got a bottle sitting in my desk that I'm going to pop open. Presumably I'll be in the office at the time so one final round with the coworkers. The people in this article se…
You should probably get an MP3 of that song, in case YouTube happens to be down at the time of the nuclear blast. That would suck.
My actual level of preparedness goes up in proportion to geopolitical tension.
Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
#24I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up". If someone started firing missiles at the US, the risk that we'd start shooting them back seems high, and I think NYC would be a city that would get pummeled in retaliation. This is probably true for a lot of major coastal cities, es…
Growing up I got the impression that a fallout shelter was a purpose-specific room deep underground. So every time I saw the "Fallout Shelter" sign on a building, I figured it was built with one of these "secret underground rooms". Think dedicated, locked stairwell that goes a thousand feet underground; after all, that's how it was pictured in my "Way Things Work" book. When we went to the bank, it was something of a…
It takes far less to be an effective fallout shelter than you might think. If you look at lethal ranges on H-Bombs you see incredible destruction, but if you're protected for the first 1hour after a blast you can be surprisingly close to the blast and live.
Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
#25A good piece of perspective on this -- it's what many civilians feel day in day out in places like Pakistan when killer drones are flying over.
Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
#26Stupid question: why would you fill up your bathtub?
It's a useful reserve for potable water. If you have nuclear fallout coming down, it's not a given that you can trust the tap water to be clean, if it runs at all.
Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
#27Stupid question: why would you fill up your bathtub?
Because the fallout would poison the water with radioactivity
Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
#28It's reasonable to assume that a adversary can and will use overreaction against perceived threads as a strategic 'unconventional weapon'. Unconventional defence would include educating a modern populace on critical thinking, thread model evaluation and even things like stoicism.
https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?t=14m5s is relevant, in which the fear of the thing killed 1500, while the thing in reality is benign.
Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
#29I find it really annoying that top two articles on HN are completely separate from engineering. Since when have posts from news sources been able to not just make it to the front page, but dominate the front page? Years ago, coming to this site helped me to become an engineer and changed the way I think about problems. But now I don't get that, and instead get plenty of feel-good articles and useless posts that don't…
You might find it useful to read the HN Guidelines [1] "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So any article under the sun is relevant for HN? That's definitely not the case as mods frequently remove posts, and as much as they would like to be, mods are not arbiters of intellectual curiosity.
Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived
#30I always struggle with news interviews that go along the lines of “So you’re entire family’s been killed. How do you feel? ”. I realise it’s easy to lose the impact on people’s lives behind a few words in a headline, and maybe I’m just too much of a cynic. Pleasingly (to me) this article’s focus on feelings has some real meaning: namely the widespread panic that was caused by the false alarm. (Like other folks in the…
I don't struggle with those interviews at all, they are outrageous and shameful. There's an argument to be made about conveying the scope of a tragedy to the public but it's also pretty clear that cameras are being shoved in people's faces.
> I don't struggle with those interviews at all, they are outrageous and shameful.
Sorry, I was being unclear in the context of an international audience: "I struggle with" translates from my-version-of-UK-English to my-US-coworker's-English as more or less exactly this :-)
(I'm told my tendency to say "sorry" continuously also gently mistranslates like this too...)