Preparedness

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Oh, don't worry. The virus probably won't kill you. Your stupid behavior, however...

"It's just the flu."  Well, it's a virus.  So it's sort of like the flu, the way people are sort of like penguins because both are animals.  In actuality, at its mildest, it's "just" a common cold.  However, you might want to ask the post-Columbian Americans about unique strains of the common cold. At its worst, it's severe pneumonia. It's also very infectious with few obvious symptoms during the transmission stage. But it is not the flu, anymore than I'm an Adelie.

"ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"  No, we're not. You're an idiot.

"Nothing is going to happen. It's just the flu." See above. You're also an idiot.

"The government now has complete control of the health care industry, colleges, and all public venues!" Not all of them, but they had control of most of them for a long time. We tried to warn you. And if you don't want to live in a nation of laws, why don't you go live in Somalia?

"I didn't want the government to have control of my life. This is why we need socialism!"  Please just kill yourself right now. You are a worthless failure.

"It's no big deal, it only kills old people."  Yeah, screw Grandma. No one likes her anyway. Are you actually listening to yourself?

"The rich elites are drinking brandy and laughing at how they manipulated us."  Right, because destroying a chunk of their own worth with the shutdowns is HILARIOUS. And what rich people do, apparently.  That's how they got rich.

"Does anyone actually KNOW anyone who's sick with this 'virus'?"  Yes.  And let's refresh prehistory for millennials (anything before 1970): the Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 50 million people.  By responding to this EARLY, we prevent that.  You don't wait for zombies to swarm outside your door before planning to react to it. Well, not if you have the brains the zombies crave.

"When it's all over, you'll feel stupid."  Right. Remember Y2K?  One pack of idiots insisted cars would stop running because they didn't know what date it was. Another pack insisted nothing at all would happen, dates didn't matter. In between, a few thousand IT people went through everything that might be affected by a date irregularity and hardened it. It was "nothing" because we planned ahead.  Hopefully, proper prior planning preventing piss poor performance, this will be "nothing." Which doesn't mean it couldn't be as bad as the Spanish Flu.

Oh, yeah-referencing Wuhan is just that: a reference to this particular strain and its Patient 0 point.  It's not "Racist" to say "it came from China." Claiming they INVENTED IT would be racist, but it provably came from there.

No, it doesn't matter what the demographic makeup of the President's advisory council as, AS LONG AS THEY ARE THE BEST PEOPLE FOR THE JOB.

Ironically, we actually have probably the ideal president for this particular issue. Trump the businessman was able to explain to banks, medical firms, megacorps how the short term loss of taking it on the chin for the consumer is longterm goodwill and economic recovery.  Zer0 the Fuckup couldn't have grasped the terms, much less explained them.  Nor could Shrillery the Hildebeest. And as for Bernie, socialists are incapable of grasping economics or they wouldn't be socialists.

"OMG! How are we supposed to plan for this?"  The same way you plan for anything. There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet.  What was the other lesson in that other movie?  DON'T PANIC.

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You don't need to make Milk Sandwiches. Why do you buy a dozen of each during EVERY event?  I was on my way to get a loaf of bread that lasts me a month. Well, not this time.  Luckily, we know how to make bread, suckers.

Look, if you buy your TP in bulk and restock as it gets low, you never need to worry about this. Besides, there's lots of copies of the NYT, USA Today, Dianetics, and Fifty Shades books available cheap. You're not going to run out of toilet paper.

Buy a few extra cans of food every week and rotate them through your stocks--just get a whole flat of something once a week. Potatoes. Vegetables. Soup. Tomato sauce. Chicken. Tuna.  Beef stew. Pretty soon, you have a month's worth of food on hand. Not thrilling, but edible. Same with dry goods like noodles, sealed crackers, peanut butter in large jars, etc.

I'm sitting here with 50 odd rolls of TP, several hundred cans of food, 3 deep freezes of animal corpses (from our livestock and the store, including about 50 lbs of bacon and 10 of salmon), shelves atop them loaded with MREs, crates of our own freeze dried meals, and a pantry full of dry goods. The zombies will be eaten by bugs and carrion eaters before we run short.  If you just approach it methodically, it's very attainable even on a tight budget.

Then you can join me as I walk through the store and snicker at the rubes.

In the meantime:
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I felt compelled to respond to the comment, but the article is interesting too.

http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/06/01/video-family-lives-in-320-square-foot-shotgun-shack/?ncid=webmail#aolc=A1CQ8g

You "home eded" your kids? I hope their spelling, grammar, punctuation and phrasing are better than yours.

Also, the lot rent they're paying exceeds what I pay for my mortgage on a house 5X that size. They don't actually "own" a home. They own a trailer on someone else's land.

Then, the new laws on child products may put their little business under. I disagree with these laws, but compliance is something all businesses have to deal with. They may be in a world of hurt shortly.

I also wouldn't allow the kid to stay up there for "2-3 days at a time." As someone else said, he's living like a squirrel. Also, fire code in almost every jurisdiction requires two escape routes from all sleeping areas. He seems to have one ladder entrance only, and that directly over an ignition source.

As a cabin for a summer camp, it's smaller than either of my tents. As a house, it's smaller than my garage and of questionable safety.

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Extracted from some comments I sent elsewhere, on the subject of dealing with disasters by gettting a boat and using it as a bug out vehicle:

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My inlaws had a 46' Dolphin Catamaran for a while.  This is, in current dollars, a near million dollar, state of the art boat, with sails, diesel engines, GPS, auto-pilot, radios, staterooms, the works.

I've got moderate experience in several types of boats, from pocket fishing types to speed boats and small sport sailboats.

They were constantly having to replace "canvas" (usually nylon, fiberglass or kevlar on boats these days), lines, electronics and do engine work.  Nearly every letter from aboard was about the latest round of maintenance, the need for safety lines while at sea (including a man overboard incident), rough weather, mechanical failures at sea, keeping watch during such problems.

Pontoons are a catamaran, and almost proof against swamping, unless shot full of holes, though that is fairly easy to do.  As I've noted previously, there's no cover nor concealment on open water.

Small boats carry almost nothing.

Large boats carry a lot less than many people think.

Unless one has a classic 18th Century wooden pinnace, with crew, including carpenters, maintenance is expensive, time consuming, and takes tools or a port.  On second thought, it does even then.

Life on a boat is not some happy-go-carefree existence of drifting along watching the lesser castes starve.  It requires, if anything, more work than a landed lifestyle.  If it was so cheap and easy, more people would do it.

If one has a definite bug out destination in mind, a boat would certainly be ONE means to consider.  It is not, however, the solution to any other problem.  It is a hole in the water that one must pour money into to maintain, even when not in use. That money can better be spent on beans, bullets and band aids, a chunk of land, tools, etc.

Like the "get a light plane and pilot's license" threads on this forum a few years ago, there's much more involved than a casual glance suggests, and I believe even experienced boat owners are underestimating what's involved. 

I'd like to see comment on this subject from experienced Naval boat and ship handlers.  I suspect they'll be a lot less sanguine than many readers.

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