It's a plausible idea. I already life in a relatively "safe" place, and yet I find myself considering moving to an even "safer" shack in the remote woods somewhere. Feels like a storm is coming...
Given the medical nature of the storm, I’d really stay within a reasonable drive of a proper hospital. A lot can happen on the helicopter ride to civilization, and that’s assuming the system is healthy enough to offer you one.
If things get really bad, humanitarian aid may or may not come for the cities, but it’s definitely not coming for a cabin in the woods. Are you prepared to live off the land?
In a disaster affecting a large area (including adversely impacting aid from outside one's area), rural people will have to be more self-sufficient than city people, but they're also in a better position to be.
Rural strategic advantages I imagine include: lower cost of living, ability to own rather than rent (lower risk of homelessness?), land to grow food and have animals, space to store and build necessities, space for disease distancing, trade with nearby farmers when city supply chains disrupted, more likely culture of neighbors knowing each other and looking out for each other.
Some of my "college town" city-slicker disaster strategy (focused on economic, natural disasters like hurricanes, industrial accidents, and bad actors) didn't quite play out with Covid-19:
* Despite our money, we couldn't insulate sufficiently from catastrophically bad action by national leadership.
* One of our own big-money biotechs who should've known better actually created the initial superspreader event in Boston.
* The wildcard fact that we're nationally strategic (economic, prestige, and military tech) and also have students of much of the world's most wealthy and powerful here, didn't matter for external aid in this scenario. (Our governor even had to engage in cloak&dagger, to keep medical worker PPE we'd bought from being seized by national.) (And, though having the children of the wealthy&powerful here might be an asset for getting aid in local/regional disasters -- acknowledging the other side of how awful some disaster-hit poor areas of the US have been treated in pre-Covid recent memory -- that mattered less when "outside" was also struggling and had no aid to give, and maybe wouldn't have mattered as much anyway, after the universities sent students home.)
And problems that were predictable, if one had been thinking of pandemic as a likely near-term scenario:
* We're densely-packed, mostly in old apartments with quirks and problems, often with roommates, and relatively little open space.
* The substantial number of self-absorbed people accustomed to getting what they want doesn't help. For example, the several joggers who huffed&puffed past me on my own street's narrow sidewalk in the space of 10 minutes last week, only one even bothered to pull up a cloth mask as they passed. And generally only ~50% mask use rate among non-joggers on that same street last week, on a straight shot line between Harvard and MIT.
What so far has played out here better than it might've, I suspect is due to Cambridge and the Boston area having a lot of smart officials who care about doing their jobs well, a wealth of medical personnel and resources, a relatively progressive culture by US standards that resulted in a lot of attention being focused on helping the less fortunate here, the fact that the universities and colleges eventually told the students not to come back after spring break debauchery-acclerated pandemic spreading, overall passable public effort at distancing&masks, and a good amount of money to make that all easier.
(That's not to say that there aren't already countless family tragedies locally due to Covid, nor that unfathomable human misery around the world hasn't been caused -- only that the local situation could've been even worse already, if we didn't have some things in our favor.)
For COVID19, MA has done terribly at 7576 deaths for a population of ~6.7M [0]. At 1090 deaths per million, that's worse than the UK (620 deaths/millon) and Belgium (843 deaths/million) [1]. MA is only eclipsed by NY (1570/1M), NJ (1400/1M) and CT (1160/1M) [2].
It's not the joggers we need to worry about, it's the elderly/infirm (average age of the dead is 81) and long term care home inhabitants (63% of deaths) [0].
Buy a Boy Scout Handbook. It has good first aid instructions. Better yet, take an EMT class. A few months of evening classes and you are very well prepared for mishaps.
Excellent points, especially for the "medical" part of the storm. But against that, we must weigh the reduced likelihood of infection in a remote place.
Furthermore, I think most of the storm is not really medical. I'm feeling something more like the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" coming. Hard to know how to handle that, but perhaps best to seem like a peasant with few opinions.
And for gods' sake, stay the hell off of social media.
Hopefully it’s a storm of change. The only dangerous protests were the ones with all the armed white people who want haircuts. We have been having many large peaceful protests for days. It’s uplifting for that to be happened, sure the news brought attention to looting and riots initially, but that’s subsided.
You probably already know this, but if you move to a more remote location make sure to have an epi-pen and good first aid kit. When you need it you really need it, speaking from experience.
I lived in NYC for 10+ years and I’m so glad I left. You’re trapped. No personal space. If the city closes bridges and tunnels you have no ability to egress unless you want to break the law or rent a helicopter.
Now that I live in a rural area I can be self sufficient for a few weeks, I’m armed, and my local neighborhood watches out for each other.
I feel completely safe where I’m at and I couldn’t imagine going back to dense/city life.
In the E.U. in any developed country if you are not in a bad neighbourhood, the chances of dying in homicide is so low, that people are considered crazy if they have a gun for ,,protecting themselves''.
I just went through a cancer blood test panel, which somewhat decreases my chances of dying, but I never thought of buying a gun.
The US isn't the EU. In rural US, police response times can be very long. Where I grew up, it would take police 30 minutes to respond to an emergency call. More rural areas can take longer. This combined with our distrust in federal government and individualistic society means many of us are willing and prepared to defend ourselves.
The US seems to fare better.
In rural EU there is simply no police to answer an emergency outside office hours. Your call is routed to a station distant of over a hundred kilometers, if they sent you their response team not only would it arrive too late but then they'd have no one to send to local emergencies.
You're told to take pictures and to report to the closest station during opening hours the next day.
Heck we even had art stealers removing a several tons statue that was literally in front of that police station in the middle of the night, this town bank ATMs where blasted so many times that the banks just stopped replacing them.
It's been decades that everyone has stopped thinking that the governement cares or would send help if anything happened.
But despite the local context being worse than in the US for much longer, still there is no neighbourhood watch and the only people who have guns are hunters and the idea of needing guns to defend ourselves is quite uncommon.
That’s correct. I’m not worried about homicide as I am property crimes.
If a second virus wave hits and basic supplies are unavailable people may resort to crime. Weapons are intended to be a deterrent. I sincerely never want to use one.
I live in a rural area and I’m unarmed and have no neighborhood watch. I grew up in areas with high crime where kids would get shot for their Nikes. I have zero need/desire for a gun. I used to be very pro-gun but could never really articulate why except that’s how I grew up. My belief now is that people who buy guns really have a desire to use them. And guns aren’t used to save lives they are for taking a life.
With the right wetsuit and a moderate level of physical fitness you could swim the Hudson River.
I tend to keep a motorcycle nearby for cutting through traffic if everything is jammed up after some unfortunate event. When you're making a decent software engineering salary it makes sense to begin being prepared for bad things IMHO. I don't go full prepper weirdo just a touch.
Context: I lived in Germany for somewhere around a year and a half, and have lived in Japan for the better part of a decade.
Gun ownership is effectively banned in Japan, and the Japanese have an amazingly competent, well-trained, and effective police force. Seriously -- they do policing right in so many ways. Germany, too.
I share this so you really understand where I am coming from when I say that I think every citizen that so desires should be armed. Moreover, I find the attitude of "nobody needs a gun" to be hopelessly privileged and naïve.
To give you some sense of why:
(II)
A friend of mine had an issue with an ex-boyfriend, here in Japan. He kept banging on her front door in the middle of the night, threatening her, the whole bit. He was an amateur athlete, and although I can handle myself in a fight, he would probably beat me into a pulp. She wouldn't stand a chance.
The cops put out a restraining order, and kept bringing him into the police station every time he violated it, but legally, they could do nothing until he actually hurt her. Moreover, he was Japanese, and she was not, which meant that the police were... less incentivized to help her.
This kind of thing happens everywhere. That's life as a minority for you.
She had no other option than to flee the country. No joke.
(III)
One day, I woke up to a massive banging sound. It was a bad neighborhood, and it sounded like people trying to kick their way through the outer mesh security door. My apartment was on the ground floor, in the back of my building
I called the police, but nobody would be able to show up for about half an hour. That's reality in a lot of the US. So I grabbed my Remington, walked to the door, and chambered a round -- the sound of a pump-action is very distinctive.
All of the sudden, the kicking stopped, and I saw through the side window what looked like about five people sprinting away from my porch. I was pretty shaken, honestly, and the cops never showed up.
The apartment owner had to replace the security mesh. Maybe another five minutes and they would have gotten through.
Don't know what they wanted, but I do know that they'd get whatever it was, because no way I could take on three people, let alone five.
I upgraded to a semi-auto after that.
(IV)
A gun is like a fire extinguisher. You don't buy one hoping you have to use it.
But if you need it, you need it, and nothing else will do.
What I meant to say is that in Europe most Asia etc you don't need a gun. Example II happens, shitty life. No reason to own a gun. Statistically for the society it's not relevant. Example III also doesn't usually happen in Europe too and the same concept above applies. In the rare cases you need to protect yourself it sucks but it's so infrequently that it doesn't matter.
USA is a very different game and that is my point.
Guns are another way of racializing - if one takes the current definition of racism: Deciding what dies. Reading gun ownership as a relationship of power makes for more meaningful discussion.
With the same thinking you should walk with a head shield because I heard people getting comets on their heads. It's great until you are in the comet lottery.
If there was an 0.4% chance of me being killed by being hit in the head by a comet, and if wearing a bike helmet would give me a 75% chance of surviving, then yes, I would want the choice to walk around in my stupid bike helmet.
That's about the level of risk and investment we are talking about here.
It seems you forgot the point that the probability of comet falling is increased by people wearing bike helmet.
You might want to listen the "science vs" episode dedicated to guns for some actual science behind it and the role of guns in violent crime: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/z3hlvr
I’m going to get downvoted for this, but I want you to know that at least one person here knows just as well as you do that you made up that shotgun-cocking story. Textbook gun nut wish-fulfillment fantasy
Indeed. My fantasies don't usually involve me being a curious mixture of absolutely terrified, sleep-deprived, and (in retrospect) woefully underprepared.
I would say that most people have had little or no experience with violence, outside of perhaps the occasional dominance contest (mostly the realm of males under the age of 30 or so).
There is a gross difference between a dominance contest and predatorial violence, and until you have experienced the latter, you really have yet to sample the full emotional gamut of human fear.
As an aside: I tend to avoid the word "criminal" in cases like this -- it's a loaded word with a lot of connotations -- and stick with "people that have never experienced predatory violence" or "people that have never encountered a predator".
Additionally, this statement does not depict what many (most?) people would consider an effective or competent police force: "she was not [Japanese], which meant that the police were... less incentivized to help her".
I am currently a foreigner living in a Scandinavian country, and I simply cannot imagine facing the same kind of discrimination from the police force (nor from other authorities) here. I think many (most?) people would agree that an effective/competent police force is not one which ends up driving foreigners out of the country by virtue of being unwilling to afford foreigners equality before the law.
What are you suggesting in (II) ?
that if she had a gun the would have left her alone? sorry but this is not how harrassing works.
That if she had shot him she would have fixed the issue ? sorry but she would be in a very different world of issue if she shot him.
Really I fail to see how a gun would be a solution or even help in this situation.
In (III) it seems that you really got lucky. Had those people been armed you'd probably be dead or severely injured, as you pointed out you stand no chance against 5 people firing at you. If you spooked them that's because they had no intent to harm you and you probably could have spooked them without the sound of a gun.
BTW the gun was only a musical instrument and you could have played a recording of pumping a gun to the same result.
(IV)
Really a bad analogy here. Using a fire extinguisher the way it is intended can only help prevent a situation becoming catastrophic, using a weapon for what is has been designed and the way it is intended can only end in an aggravated situation.
Then the justifying something using a tautology is simply failing to justify it.
What I gather from this is that you have a firm belief in guns and that there is no alternative, akin to religious belief.
I don't think it's going to be huge, but in France most people indeed fled Paris. Perhaps this event has convinced many people that telecommuting actually works, and we'll see a durable increase in people working from home, and avoiding public transportation.
I'm doubtful we are going to see any significant change. All the things that were drawing people to cities will continue to do so when the thing is over.
The French government did give 48h for people to choose their place of indefinite lock-down mid-March. Based on the limited statistics that I did gather over my ~50 employees based in Paris, roughly half of them went away from Paris just prior the lock-down.
The phone data is partial data as it is from a single mobile phone networks out of the four. It has been since updated to 2 out of the 4 (the other two supposedly respect their customer privacy).
These number are not about Paris, which has a population of around 2 millions people, but for the whole metropolitan area.
For the actual city of Paris 600 000 people left the city in a matter of days in relation to the lockdown announcement, or about 27% of population.
https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356
27% of paris inhabitants left the city overnight based on phone data from 2 of the 4 french mobile phone networks.
I'm unsure of what the number would be if we added the other two phone operators and the people who wanted to leave but could. But this would probably not amount to "most".
52 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadIf things get really bad, humanitarian aid may or may not come for the cities, but it’s definitely not coming for a cabin in the woods. Are you prepared to live off the land?
In a disaster affecting a large area (including adversely impacting aid from outside one's area), rural people will have to be more self-sufficient than city people, but they're also in a better position to be.
Rural strategic advantages I imagine include: lower cost of living, ability to own rather than rent (lower risk of homelessness?), land to grow food and have animals, space to store and build necessities, space for disease distancing, trade with nearby farmers when city supply chains disrupted, more likely culture of neighbors knowing each other and looking out for each other.
Some of my "college town" city-slicker disaster strategy (focused on economic, natural disasters like hurricanes, industrial accidents, and bad actors) didn't quite play out with Covid-19:
* Despite our money, we couldn't insulate sufficiently from catastrophically bad action by national leadership.
* One of our own big-money biotechs who should've known better actually created the initial superspreader event in Boston.
* The wildcard fact that we're nationally strategic (economic, prestige, and military tech) and also have students of much of the world's most wealthy and powerful here, didn't matter for external aid in this scenario. (Our governor even had to engage in cloak&dagger, to keep medical worker PPE we'd bought from being seized by national.) (And, though having the children of the wealthy&powerful here might be an asset for getting aid in local/regional disasters -- acknowledging the other side of how awful some disaster-hit poor areas of the US have been treated in pre-Covid recent memory -- that mattered less when "outside" was also struggling and had no aid to give, and maybe wouldn't have mattered as much anyway, after the universities sent students home.)
And problems that were predictable, if one had been thinking of pandemic as a likely near-term scenario:
* We're densely-packed, mostly in old apartments with quirks and problems, often with roommates, and relatively little open space.
* The substantial number of self-absorbed people accustomed to getting what they want doesn't help. For example, the several joggers who huffed&puffed past me on my own street's narrow sidewalk in the space of 10 minutes last week, only one even bothered to pull up a cloth mask as they passed. And generally only ~50% mask use rate among non-joggers on that same street last week, on a straight shot line between Harvard and MIT.
What so far has played out here better than it might've, I suspect is due to Cambridge and the Boston area having a lot of smart officials who care about doing their jobs well, a wealth of medical personnel and resources, a relatively progressive culture by US standards that resulted in a lot of attention being focused on helping the less fortunate here, the fact that the universities and colleges eventually told the students not to come back after spring break debauchery-acclerated pandemic spreading, overall passable public effort at distancing&masks, and a good amount of money to make that all easier.
(That's not to say that there aren't already countless family tragedies locally due to Covid, nor that unfathomable human misery around the world hasn't been caused -- only that the local situation could've been even worse already, if we didn't have some things in our favor.)
It's not the joggers we need to worry about, it's the elderly/infirm (average age of the dead is 81) and long term care home inhabitants (63% of deaths) [0].
[0] https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-june-13-2020/dow... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
Furthermore, I think most of the storm is not really medical. I'm feeling something more like the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" coming. Hard to know how to handle that, but perhaps best to seem like a peasant with few opinions.
And for gods' sake, stay the hell off of social media.
Who was hurt? Did I miss a headline?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/17/facebook-shuts-down-g...
Now that I live in a rural area I can be self sufficient for a few weeks, I’m armed, and my local neighborhood watches out for each other.
I feel completely safe where I’m at and I couldn’t imagine going back to dense/city life.
I just went through a cancer blood test panel, which somewhat decreases my chances of dying, but I never thought of buying a gun.
Same in the US. But if you _are_ in a bad neighborhood, it's probably safer to be in Kabul.
Heck we even had art stealers removing a several tons statue that was literally in front of that police station in the middle of the night, this town bank ATMs where blasted so many times that the banks just stopped replacing them.
It's been decades that everyone has stopped thinking that the governement cares or would send help if anything happened.
But despite the local context being worse than in the US for much longer, still there is no neighbourhood watch and the only people who have guns are hunters and the idea of needing guns to defend ourselves is quite uncommon.
If a second virus wave hits and basic supplies are unavailable people may resort to crime. Weapons are intended to be a deterrent. I sincerely never want to use one.
I tend to keep a motorcycle nearby for cutting through traffic if everything is jammed up after some unfortunate event. When you're making a decent software engineering salary it makes sense to begin being prepared for bad things IMHO. I don't go full prepper weirdo just a touch.
Context: I lived in Germany for somewhere around a year and a half, and have lived in Japan for the better part of a decade.
Gun ownership is effectively banned in Japan, and the Japanese have an amazingly competent, well-trained, and effective police force. Seriously -- they do policing right in so many ways. Germany, too.
I share this so you really understand where I am coming from when I say that I think every citizen that so desires should be armed. Moreover, I find the attitude of "nobody needs a gun" to be hopelessly privileged and naïve.
To give you some sense of why:
(II)
A friend of mine had an issue with an ex-boyfriend, here in Japan. He kept banging on her front door in the middle of the night, threatening her, the whole bit. He was an amateur athlete, and although I can handle myself in a fight, he would probably beat me into a pulp. She wouldn't stand a chance.
The cops put out a restraining order, and kept bringing him into the police station every time he violated it, but legally, they could do nothing until he actually hurt her. Moreover, he was Japanese, and she was not, which meant that the police were... less incentivized to help her.
This kind of thing happens everywhere. That's life as a minority for you.
She had no other option than to flee the country. No joke.
(III)
One day, I woke up to a massive banging sound. It was a bad neighborhood, and it sounded like people trying to kick their way through the outer mesh security door. My apartment was on the ground floor, in the back of my building
I called the police, but nobody would be able to show up for about half an hour. That's reality in a lot of the US. So I grabbed my Remington, walked to the door, and chambered a round -- the sound of a pump-action is very distinctive.
All of the sudden, the kicking stopped, and I saw through the side window what looked like about five people sprinting away from my porch. I was pretty shaken, honestly, and the cops never showed up.
The apartment owner had to replace the security mesh. Maybe another five minutes and they would have gotten through.
Don't know what they wanted, but I do know that they'd get whatever it was, because no way I could take on three people, let alone five.
I upgraded to a semi-auto after that.
(IV)
A gun is like a fire extinguisher. You don't buy one hoping you have to use it.
But if you need it, you need it, and nothing else will do.
USA is a very different game and that is my point.
See someone else's comment above about privilege and naïveté.
That's about the level of risk and investment we are talking about here.
[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/1750/violent-crime-in-the-us...
You might want to listen the "science vs" episode dedicated to guns for some actual science behind it and the role of guns in violent crime: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/z3hlvr
There is a gross difference between a dominance contest and predatorial violence, and until you have experienced the latter, you really have yet to sample the full emotional gamut of human fear.
As an aside: I tend to avoid the word "criminal" in cases like this -- it's a loaded word with a lot of connotations -- and stick with "people that have never experienced predatory violence" or "people that have never encountered a predator".
Additionally, this statement does not depict what many (most?) people would consider an effective or competent police force: "she was not [Japanese], which meant that the police were... less incentivized to help her".
I am currently a foreigner living in a Scandinavian country, and I simply cannot imagine facing the same kind of discrimination from the police force (nor from other authorities) here. I think many (most?) people would agree that an effective/competent police force is not one which ends up driving foreigners out of the country by virtue of being unwilling to afford foreigners equality before the law.
In (III) it seems that you really got lucky. Had those people been armed you'd probably be dead or severely injured, as you pointed out you stand no chance against 5 people firing at you. If you spooked them that's because they had no intent to harm you and you probably could have spooked them without the sound of a gun. BTW the gun was only a musical instrument and you could have played a recording of pumping a gun to the same result.
(IV) Really a bad analogy here. Using a fire extinguisher the way it is intended can only help prevent a situation becoming catastrophic, using a weapon for what is has been designed and the way it is intended can only end in an aggravated situation. Then the justifying something using a tautology is simply failing to justify it. What I gather from this is that you have a firm belief in guns and that there is no alternative, akin to religious belief.
That seems ... implausible? Some people left yes, but not most surely...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
Out of a population of 10 million so "most" is incorrect however it is a surprisingly large number.
The phone data is partial data as it is from a single mobile phone networks out of the four. It has been since updated to 2 out of the 4 (the other two supposedly respect their customer privacy). These number are not about Paris, which has a population of around 2 millions people, but for the whole metropolitan area.
For the actual city of Paris 600 000 people left the city in a matter of days in relation to the lockdown announcement, or about 27% of population. https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356
I'm unsure of what the number would be if we added the other two phone operators and the people who wanted to leave but could. But this would probably not amount to "most".
source: https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/confinement-plus-de-25000... and https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356