Ask Lemmy

I live in Japan and we call 3 days of water, meds, and food "tuesday" (well, 火曜日 technically). Then again, we also have earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and the odd tornado or forest fire.

I don't know the UK, but China is definitely targeting our infrastructure in the U.S, and there is enough PLC hardware online on shodan, that it will be easy for them. I would be surprised if it's all that much different in the UK, but who knows, maybe they're not expecting the same kind of attack. Regardless, that kind of resilience promotion is only responsible.

Wish we had that here.

Oh, that and also there's probably a revolution/civil war coming

The idea is that in a longer outage you're fucked anyway

but if you have "toilet paper" for 3 tot 10 days that will put less strain and panic in the system

it's not saying it's coming or coming soon but having "toilet paper" for a couple of days is good

Fuel protest blockades that caused some amount of supply chain shock have happened at least 4 times since 2000, then there's been random riots in cities that in some cases materialized out of nowhere (though widely suspected to be a Russian social media op), then covid, and now there's the super El Nino threatening to cause droughts and global food shortages. So there's that.

Mostly prepping to go without food, electricity, travelling or communications because of sabotage of vital infrastructure (in Europe and UK is happening on a weekly basis) and climate catastrophes which are regular in the UK since 2020(ish) and increasing. There are also potential lockdowns because of pandemics (e.g. measles from US). Also Brexit Britain is now inoperative in terms of food safety, really, since it relies on mainland Europe food imports to survive. If something fails or there's a mega-storm, supermarkets will be empty for days like they were in 2018 or 2020.

Have you looked outside? The world is very unstable right now. Most EU countries are implementing preparedness right now.

As far as dumbass dan goes, a broken clock is right at least two times a day LOL

Go back and read the news from after some recent natural diasters - winter storms, hurricanes, landslides. People can be suddenly cut off from supplies and even with an immediate response it could be a week or more until basic food and water is avaiable to everyone. Most stores in cities need daily or at least a couple times a week of deliveries to keep shelves stocked. Rural areas aren't any better. None of them are set up to have every customer show up in the same 24 hour period to restock. Having a bunch of stuff on hand that doesn't need refridgeration and can be eaten as is, not cooked, is very important.

Im very suspicious about this suddenly becoming a thing. If it was earlier I would be suscpicious about wanting to have a spike in spending before the election but way to late to have that have impact. Would have if it was pushed more in spetember so it could come out with october figures.

Notice the world is rearming with alarming haste? The post WWII calm, the rules based order, just died, due to Russia's military agression of conquest, China's weaponization of trade and America's unmittigated use of both.

The predictable world marked by moderation in good things and bad, is gone now. When the hits come, you can expect the bullies to take your lunch money. Partnerships with other countries are just one election away from turning on you or changing allegiances. You can't even count on geopolitical analysis of rational behaviour and self interest. This being exemplified by Russia and the USs self immolation.

The governments around the world understand the risks, and expect more discontinuity of services. Pandemics, freezer hackings, war, AI, planetary boundaries and climate change and more all mean that our previous quests of efficiency and profitability instead of resilience and sustainability as a goal, make everything hyper fragile.

When the government says stock up to last a while during disruptions, its because they know they aren't capable of shielding everyone from everything. They are warning you "we'll take care of the big stuff, but for the small stuff you're on your own."

Most European countries have a version of this, but what is driving Britain's "be prepared" campaign seems to be:

• Seeing what happened during COVID.
• Russia et all doing shit.
• Several rounds of cyber attacks.
• America making noises about Greenland and getting concerning and less reliable over all.
• Effects of climate change (Heatwaves and Storms).

Basically a load of civil servants have been asked to figure out how we can be prepared for emergencies and they've come back with "people should be ready for a disaster so we have some wiggle room during our response".

A lot of it in reality is just general advice to save the government some energy if something does happen and a lot of other countries have more extraordinary things (The Netherlands have disaster sirens, Poland has bomb shelters).

Do I think it's preparation for a war? No. I'm not getting Protect And Survive vibes, but things are getting rather concerning in terms of things like methods of attack (cyber attacks) and climate change (we just had some horrible Heatwaves). Basically the government is asking people to prepare for disasters in case something happens that they don't expect (like what happened with COVID).

Russia is a threat to Europe again. You may have left the EU but you've not physically moved anywhere. They probably won't bomb UK directly but they can and will try to sabotage things. You're a member of NATO still.

Extreme weather and storms will be more common with climate change.

Critical infrastructure is all connected. One vulnerability could take banks offline for a few days for example.

This writeup here goes into it in some depth. Wish I had the full non-paywalled version, but hopefully that's enough.

Not really what you're asking, but having several days of bottled water on hand is arguably a good idea in general.

Water's one of the things that you're going to need before too long if some sort of disaster does strike. It keeps well, and it's not terribly expensive.

Anything.

Could be an unfortunate freak accident that disables the electricity grid.

Could be that all trees around your home all fall down and block the roads so you can't get to the store.

Could be that you break your leg and can't go to the store to get food or water for 10 days.

Could be flooding, could be drought, could be wildfires, could be a reversal of earths magnetic field or a solar storm that destroys all electronics and throws us back to the stone age.

3-10 days is the realm of "something could happen that meaningfully disrupts the general supply chain". and also still reasonable to expect of people. Like, they're not going to ask you to stock up 6 months worth of water and food in a 50m² apartment. That's not going to happen. Too expensive, don't have the room. And they're also not going to ask you to stock one (1) cookie for an emergency in case you get hungry tomorrow afternoon.

And also, if the problem is so huge that the government, military and NGO people can't fix it in 10 days, that's a pretty damn big problem and it could be that stocking up from 1 month doesn't help much more than 10 days, because they can only solve it in 5 years.

3-10 days also buys time to figure out evacuation without having to think about literally the next meal.

I know some of it is from the problem of cyber security issues, very real ones, that stem from ai models, both the llm kind and the more advanced multi modal coding variety that have made finding vulnerabilities and then incorporating attacks into home brewed or nation state brewed targeting much, much easier and faster. This has resulted in very real network problems, and isn’t expected to get easier to defend against because it’s not like you just update for ai facilitated hacks and you’re done, they are just going to increase in numbers until basically an entirely different method of protecting systems is employed.

This has made many people nervous and believe that it’s only a matter of time before financial systems, energy sector systems, water systems, basically all the critical infrastructure, are attacked and have to go offline until long term fixes are found.

There will be people saying ai is all an illusion and just next word predictive analytics that can’t even do basic math, but those days are over, it was true months ago, but the modern models are much, much more capable and llms aren’t what’s being used to do the hacking, llms are being used to find known vulnerabilities that were largely ignored or orgs have been too slow to patch, but that’s not the only method being used to find new vulnerabilities. It’s a problem, cybersecurity in the ai companies have said they’re probably 18 months away from developing models that are specifically for defensive cybersecurity, so even they can’t and aren’t profiting from this issue right now, so it’s not just hype.

That being said, I’ve always been a believer in having a few days at least of food, water, medical supplies, and power generation. I don’t believe more than that will be necessary because if it is, we’re all screwed and no amount of prepping will ensure safety and over stocking will just make you a target and put a target on your family and property. Just be smart and have the basics you would need for a really bad weather event. You should always have that.

Everybody else here captured the uncertainty in the world, but even without specifics you can still do a tabletop exercise without jumping all the way into a rabbit hole and see what you'd need to have to spend three days without being able to buy supplies. Most of those kind of lists just end up being things you'd need anyway: water, food, any prescriptions, some local currency if credit card machines are down, etc. Decide how much you think some event is likely and how much budget you have and react accordingly, or don't. Take it as an opportunity to change out the batteries in any smoke dectectors or battery powered radios, maybe top off any power bricks you have for charging phones.

If you decide to stock up on something there are a lot of resources out there already on what makes sense. If you decide not to stock up on anything then be aware that people might not be willing to share if something does happen; you had the same opportunity to prep and the same information that everyone else did.

Most of my knowledge of UK preparedness is either from WWII documentaries or dubious sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgwaOEg0Uqo

Climate change affects power generators.

When rivers dry up, it obviously affects hydroelectric generators.

But it also affects nuclear power, because they're dependent on a constant source of cool water. If a river water level drops below the nuclear power plant's water intake pipe, the plant has to shut down because it can't cool the nuclear reactor vessel

Bovinejonyono is a grifter dumbass

That being said, my nearby gas station just ran out of fuel, which is weeeird.