Re:The Gaslighting of Science
by enraged_camel on Sunday April 11, 2021 @01:34AM
(#26767710)
>>4) I think the real take away from this is that crazy preppers aren't actually crazy, and having some reserves (financial or otherwise) put aside for disasters is still a good idea.
There is a difference between being prepared, and being a prepper.
If you have six months of savings in the bank, a few gallons of gas and clean water in the garage and dry food in the pantry, you're prepared. If you have several booby-trapped supply caches in the wilderness that you have marked on your map, you're a prepper.
Re:The Gaslighting of Science
by jay_kyburz on Sunday April 11, 2021 @02:00AM
(#26767803)
>If you have six months of savings in the bank, a few gallons of gas and clean water in the garage and dry food in the pantry, you're prepared.
I think most people in my world would use the word "prepper" for this and I didn't think the word had negative connotations. Also that 99% of people don't even have that.
Having 3 months of salary stashed aside is standard financial advice in Germany. This is not saying that everyone or even most people do it (most couldn’t even afford to do it), but no one would ever call someone like that a prepper.
If you only look at the financial side, I'd agree. If you added that a good portion of that should be in cash, and to have a few weeks of fresh water and long shelf-live food stored at your house, I'm pretty sure the majority in Germany would call that person a prepper, even though having two weeks of everything required is in the government's guidelines. It's just that we've gone so long without a major interruption that it seems silly to most people.
An aside: in Germany, “Hamstern” = stocking up on excessively large amounts of something that is feared to be in short supply thereafter, although it can carry negative connotation, as a selfish refusal to share with others (when I lived in Germany, I was always struck by people's general politeness and generosity, so hoarding for no reason would be frowned upon). Also, “Hamsterkäufe” refers to purchases made out of fear of a future shortage.
Re:The Gaslighting of Science
by jay_kyburz on Sunday April 11, 2021 @06:13AM
(#26769129)
Wow, 2 weeks of water is about 20 liters per person! That's a lot of water to have sitting around. Two weeks of food is kind of easy if you shop at Costco :)
Army surplus water canisters are cheap and hold 20l each without taking much space. With water tablets for RVs the water can sit for 6 months.
Or if you use bottled water anyways just keep a larger stash that you rotate through. Less work, but takes a bit more space
As to 2; I don't follow cable news, but The Atlantic and NYTimes reported a lot of this relatively early (April 1st)
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/coronavir...
1) HN didn't know a lot about COVID at the time it emerged into the world. If nobody was trying to inform HN about COVID, is that a failing? Probably not. It seems highly likely to me that the actual scientists had good research done on respiratory diseases and probably got a handle on the situation quickly. HN getting detailed information like this ~12-18 months after the outbreak is actually pretty speedy.
2) The mass media were and probably will continue to be serially wrong about COVID, which is expected of the media. They aren't in the business of being technically correct. If they were interested in being technically correct they'd be too squeamish to work in the media. Ditto if they had any deep understanding of how to control infectious diseases they'd have gone into careers in epidemiology rather than journalism, they're learning this stuff at the same speed as everyone else.
3) There aren't a lot of new learnings in the pandemic. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that governments can't organise themselves to deal with a crisis in less than 6 months, the government isn't a rapid response outfit. Based on the patterns of success and failure of responses it seems recent memory of SARS is a better predictor of outcomes than competence, so a lot of the broad flows of events were probably predictable and predicted in advance. Some new ideas is that this JIT business is madness, and the amount of travel people do spreads diseases in an eyebrow raising fashion (maybe there should be less of it?).
4) I think the real take away from this is that crazy preppers aren't actually crazy, and having some reserves (financial or otherwise) put aside for disasters is still a good idea.