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> Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact. Most of the time preparing for most disasters has a few common fea
by aaomidi 6y ago
> Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact.
Most of the time preparing for most disasters has a few common features to it.
- Food
- Power
- Transportation
- Housing/Shelter
These are common issues with every single possible disaster that can happen. So instead of preparing for "every disaster possible", you need to prepare for the outcome of "every disaster possible."
These four things can reduce lives lost by a significant amount, and as a 21st century society we need to limit our growth to the point where we're keeping up with the potential disaster situation, less we regress a thousand years because we didn't.
So no you're absolutely wrong. You don't need to plan for disasters at this scale. You plan for the outcomes of it.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoOK, but... take power, for example. Ensuring power after a Carrington Event is completely different from ensuring power after cold weather in Texas. Not completely different because of scale; completely different because the intersection of the solutions is very close to the empty set. So, while your "consequences" approach has a lot of merit, what you have to do to handle the consequences still depends significantly on what the cause of the problem was. Which brings you back to preparing for multiple scenarios. (I'll give you this, though: It may be fewer scenarios than a cause-based approach.)
- njarboe 6y agoIf you do any camping you can easily be prepared for most disasters that happen when it's not winter. Buy some serious sleeping bags and you could be ready for disasters in winter also.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoCarrington Event does have overlap with EMPs, if I understand my physics correctly, so there's at least an overlap with military concerns, which is tied to unlimited budget.
- bordercases 6y agoUnfortunately military concerns are not the same as civilian ones.
- wongarsu 6y agoThe solution to keeping the entire grid powered is very different between the two events, but the solution to keeping hospitals powered is basically the same (diesel backups with huge tanks). Unless there's extreme weather you don't need to keep the entire grid operational for people to survive, only key infrastructure. So you can cut out those concerns if you have preparations for extreme hot and cold events (with cold being much easier to prepare for)
- bordercases 6y agoAt what point do you allow for any risk management whatsoever? Your arguments against risk management rely on an an event space being large enough such that attempting to prepare for at least some events is absurd. That's the charitable version anyhow since I'm assuming that you actually do want to do risk management, which you discounted out of hand at the beginning just because there are many risks. Any heuristic to make this more tractable (including ones that eschew having to work with probabilities and thus event space sizes, like the consequence-based approach) works in favor of more prep.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI said that you can't mitigate every possible disaster. It is a logical fallacy to conclude that I meant "do no risk management whatsoever"; that does not at all follow from what I said.
- njarboe 6y agoDon't forget the most important one: Water. Many areas have natural water sources that could be used in a serious emergency, but having some potable water on hand and a way to purify more, is pretty easy and inexpensive.
- aaomidi 6y agoYep! I include Water in Food, but definitely extremely important as well.