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We have state and national organizations which are supposed to prepare for large scale emergencies. They do practice. "real need to lock down say two states"

by dalke 12y ago

We have state and national organizations which are supposed to prepare for large scale emergencies. They do practice. "real need to lock down say two states" Please don't use "lock down". Not only is it tainted with the hyped up fears that schools have to be scared all the time (have you considered what should happen if a fire alarm goes off during a lockdown?), but the correct term is "quarantined". I even linked to the laws regulating quarantine. "most armies will tell you preparation beats most everything else." That's begging the question. Are there useful mass-scale preparations? You haven't demonstrated even that there is a predictable way to handle all possible pandemics. We could find out that a pandemic is carried through cat fur, and that the best response is to kill, shave, or vaccinate all of the cats. How do we practice that? Remember the anthrax attacks? The government gave advice on what people might do in case of attack, including sealing a room with plastic sheeting and duct tape, and suggested that people should stock up with those materials. Did you do so? Do you have a pile of plastic in storage somewhere in your house. It's only effective if you can put it up within the first few minutes of a biological attack. Have you practiced doing so? What about your neighbors? Why do you think any mass advice for possible pandemic would be any more successful? In Switzerland, nearly every home has a bomb shelter, and there are inspections to verify that the shelter is in working condition. Why don't we have those same preparations here? Even in the bomb shelter fads during the Cold War, it wasn't a law and there were no government inspectors for the US. Why did we not do those preparations? Why did we stop doing duck and cover drills? It's eminently reasonable to assume that your position doesn't hold in the real world.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Thank you for pointing out Swiss bomb shelters - I did not know it was that extensive. I agree about the term lockdown and the fears around schools - not a term I would want to use again in this discussion. But I cannot help but wonder if the Swiss are right and we, without plastic in our garages, are wrong. But if they are right they have been paying their insurance for fifty years. That's a lot of dividends and no payouts.
- dalke 12y ago
  But you can help it. What is your payoff matrix? How much effort do you think it's worth to prepare for every possible eventuality? You'll notice that while flight crew give instructions on how to use various safety equipment, they don't actually run through drills where the masks comes down and they check to make sure they are put on correctly; they don't run through drills where the passengers actually leave the aircraft; they don't do all that while dumping simulated smoke in the cabins. You'll notice that while there are tests of the evacuation alarms around, say, a nuclear power plant, they don't actually run mass tests to see if everyone can evacuate in time. New York City is in the 50-mile evacuation zone for Indian Point Energy Center. And those "plans" are more like "fantasy". What you can do is read about disaster planning for those different scenario (hurricane, tsunami, nuclear reactor meltdown, bomb shelters, plastic sheeting & duct tape against biological attacks, fire drills, airplane evacuations, etc.), see what the plans are, and figure out why people came to the conclusions that they did. There's no reason to make wild guesses about what you think it should be when there's plenty of material for you to ground your thinking. Regarding specifically nuclear bomb shelters, read Freeman Dyson's essay at http://scilib.narod.ru/Physics/Dyson/Weapons_and_Hope/Weapons_Hope.htm#chap08 http://scilib.narod.ru/Physics/Dyson/Weapons_and_Hope/Weapon... . For the US, a nuclear shelter program could destabilize the arms race, since we would be planning to defend ourselves against Soviet attacks, giving the Soviets cause to think that we would attack them knowing that we would be more likely to survive. The Swiss bomb shelters don't destablize international politics in anything like the same way.

by dalke 12y ago

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

Thank you for pointing out Swiss bomb shelters - I did not know it was that extensive. I agree about the term lockdown and the fears around schools - not a term I would want to use again in this discussion. But I cannot help but wonder if the Swiss are right and we, without plastic in our garages, are wrong. But if they are right they have been paying their insurance for fifty years. That's a lot of dividends and no payouts.

dalke 12y ago
But you can help it. What is your payoff matrix? How much effort do you think it's worth to prepare for every possible eventuality? You'll notice that while flight crew give instructions on how to use various safety equipment, they don't actually run through drills where the masks comes down and they check to make sure they are put on correctly; they don't run through drills where the passengers actually leave the aircraft; they don't do all that while dumping simulated smoke in the cabins. You'll notice that while there are tests of the evacuation alarms around, say, a nuclear power plant, they don't actually run mass tests to see if everyone can evacuate in time. New York City is in the 50-mile evacuation zone for Indian Point Energy Center. And those "plans" are more like "fantasy". What you can do is read about disaster planning for those different scenario (hurricane, tsunami, nuclear reactor meltdown, bomb shelters, plastic sheeting & duct tape against biological attacks, fire drills, airplane evacuations, etc.), see what the plans are, and figure out why people came to the conclusions that they did. There's no reason to make wild guesses about what you think it should be when there's plenty of material for you to ground your thinking. Regarding specifically nuclear bomb shelters, read Freeman Dyson's essay at http://scilib.narod.ru/Physics/Dyson/Weapons_and_Hope/Weapons_Hope.htm#chap08 http://scilib.narod.ru/Physics/Dyson/Weapons_and_Hope/Weapon... . For the US, a nuclear shelter program could destabilize the arms race, since we would be planning to defend ourselves against Soviet attacks, giving the Soviets cause to think that we would attack them knowing that we would be more likely to survive. The Swiss bomb shelters don't destablize international politics in anything like the same way.