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Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

lcamtuf.coredump.cx

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Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#261

Post by legulere »

> first-class democracy lapsing into armed conflict

I can come up with none

> Throughout much of the recorded history, the monetary systems of the western world employed so-called commodity money, generally settling on coins minted out of silver or gold.

This is false. Silver and gold coinage was largely restricted to international trade, transactions were mostly done by keeping tabs. Gold and Silver coins developed most likely as you can easily produce them to share the spoils of war with soldiers. The important property of Gold and Silver is that you can easily steal it. See Debt the first 5000 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years)

> Biking on public roads? Wear a helmet

Head injuries are way more common in cars than on bicycles. Wearing a helmet while driving a car has a bigger benefit.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#262

Post by legulere »

jorazzle wrote: post #98
agentdrtran wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That site seems great but it's still a tough sell when the "welcome to rational prepping" guide includes AI and CRISPR as causes.

Why? Elon just said AI is a bigger threat than North Korea.

Artificial intelligence is a total misnomer. The current machine learning techniques that are becoming successful are better described as pattern recognition. A network that is designed to recognize kittens (or other stuff) is neither intelligent nor dangerous.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#263

Post by JshWright »

giardini wrote: post #218
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly is a middle ground - however why stay in the same place and expect a different future? New Orleans isn't that much more prepared for another flood. Houston re-did the entire bayou system about 5 years ago and yet here we are. People's aversion to moving, especially after a major disaster, boggles my mind.

Well, they really didn't "redo the entire bayou system". They considered alternatives and chose the most politically correct one for the parties involved. They knew it wasn't enough for something like Harvey but they didn't think there would be a Harvey( a supposed "500-year event") anytime soon. Black Swan anyone? AndrewKemendo says: "People's aversion to moving, especially after a major disaster, boggles my mind."…

> etc.

You can't just name three places in a very large country and then say 'etc'.

There are plenty of places with much lower risks of natural disasters. That's a big part of the reason my family lives in central New York.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#264

Post by JshWright »

cbr wrote: post #204
Sukotto wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Katrina was a "once a hundred year" storm. Likewise Sandy. Now Harvey is a "once in 500". All within 12 years. I think we should stop measuring against data from a different global climate.

A "hundred year storm" doesn't mean we expect one per hundred years globally, but one per hundred years locally.

Even that is a little misleading (given how bad our intuition about statistics is). A '100 year flood' is flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year (it's independent of what happened 1, 5, or 50 years ago).

Calling it a '100 year flood' makes people think 'oh, good, now we shouldn't have one of those for another ~100 years'. In reality, the odds of a flood of the same magnitude occurring next year are exactly the same as they were this year.

Grady (of the Practical Engineering YouTube channel) has a great video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc

(Grady is in the Austin area, so hopefully he hasn't too much 'practical' experience from this storm...)

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#265

Post by oblio »

nl wrote: post #260
oblio wrote: post #248

Earlier 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…

After '90, if you discount all the Russia-provoked conflicts, there's basically only ex-Yugoslavia as far as conflicts are concerned. Every other event on that list would basically count as a normal day in Baltimore :)

You can never predict the future but I'm willing to bet that the following countries will be peaceful for at least the next 20 years:

- Czech Republic

- Slovakia

- Poland

- Hungary

- Slovenia

- Croatia

- Romania

- Albania

Places like the Czech Republic will probably be among the safest places on Earth, both regarding economic, political stability and possible outside aggression, for the next half a century, in my opinion.

On the other hand, people were saying similar things before WW1 :D

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#267

Post by agarden »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #200
jfdi wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most successful trait I've seen in survivors it's to know when to stay put and when to move. @andrewkemendo, can you say more about this? Is there a framework for making that decision based on situation on the ground, etc?

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.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#269

Post by eighthnate »

aedron wrote: post #266

What is the safer place in a 'doomsday' scenario - the city or the country-side?

The countryside. It's where the food is. Imagine if all transportation/energy/etc were destroyed. Imagine NYC or LA completely dark and with no food coming in. Millions of people without food, without light, etc within city limits. It would get very dangerous, very quick. Nevermind the garbage piling up, nonexistent sanitation, etc.

Re: Doomsday planning for less crazy folk

#270

Post by dsfyu404ed »

dmix wrote: post #31

> It's not that life-altering disasters are rare: every year we hear about millions of people displaced by wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods. Pretty much always in the sames typical places though... See: 'tornado alley', island nations with tsunami seasons, california wildfires, etc, etc (over a long enough timespan)... > Heck, not a decade goes by without at least one first-class democracy lapsing into a…

>countries with a perpetual history of dictators and authoritarianism

So Europe?

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