
We Should All Be Preppers - throw0101a
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/we-should-all-be-preppers/611074/
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ThrowawayR2
Honestly, I'm a little irritated by the breathless tone of the article.
There's a happy medium to be had between being blithely unprepared and
building a doomsday bunker stocked for the apocalypse. Building up a 30-90 day
supply of essentials is neither unreasonably cautious (e.g. for a major
earthquake or hurricane) nor unreasonably expensive. For those who enjoy
camping, much of the gear, like camp stoves or solar lighting, can even serve
a dual-purpose in the event of a disaster.

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foxyv
Everyone should have a little camp stove. They are great for stuff like power
outages and trips across country. Saves a ton of money on eating at
restaurants in the middle of nowhere that give you food poisoning.

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AtlasBarfed
What is apparent is that nobody is stockpiling anything, and our supply chain
doesn't have warehousing buffers like it used to 30 years ago.

So if nobody has anything stocked, then the toilet paper panic effect grips
literally every key supply, and dangerous panic ensues.

So I'll be stocking up gradually once things return to relative normalcy, and
a plan to get out of dodge.

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Tepix
Just doing what most governments tell their populace: Keep enough food and
water and other supplies for two weeks around - would go a long way.

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kyuudou
Odd The Atlantic is publishing this. I guess a veiled warning to upper middle-
income folks.

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fallingfrog
For us to be preppers on an individual level is immensely silly- it’s on a
societal level that you want to build redundancy, stability, and disaster
plans. If your big plan is to defend cans of creamed corn with a sniper rifle,
then your plan is to fail.

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AtlasBarfed
But what this minor stress shows is that we are in a broken state, with no
sufficient motivational force to clean it up politically.

What this revealed is the utter lack of a functioning government we have,
regardless of the political firebomb that currently runs it.

I was complaining loudly about the CDC not having an actionable ventilator
plan given the SARS/MERS precursors that also needed them, but they DID have a
contract/plan with an upstart company...

That got acquired by Covidien and then the bid/project was cancelled by some
middle manager.

So our readiness is completely broken, and the current
capitalism/accounting/budgeting/regulatory structure has no ability to
stockpile/prepare.

