I don't know what FEMA camps you are talking about.  It makes sense to prepare facilities in anticipation of natural disasters, like Hurricane Ian.  Inevitably, some people will need temporary lodging as part of the disaster response.  But FEMA has not built 1300, 1000 or even 500 camps.  I am unaware of any such camps in my area, Western Washington.  I would expect they have made some preparations, but there is no way the government has set up a bunch of camps like you described.  I am skeptical about the 100 million body bags or whatever, as well.  It doesn't surprise me that someone is claiming this, but it always surprises me that people believe it.

ddt58 wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:I don't know what FEMA camps you are talking about.  It makes sense to prepare facilities in anticipation of natural disasters, like Hurricane Ian.  Inevitably, some people will need temporary lodging as part of the disaster response.  But FEMA has not built 1300, 1000 or even 500 camps.  I am unaware of any such camps in my area, Western Washington.  I would expect they have made some preparations, but there is no way the government has set up a bunch of camps like you described.  I am skeptical about the 100 million body bags or whatever, as well.  It doesn't surprise me that someone is claiming this, but it always surprises me that people believe it.

Yeah. In the UK the story broke yesterday that they war gamed a complete electricity blackout form the whole country for seven days, and people are in absolute panic. What does this mean? The poor little souls are so scared. It means they are doing their job. I’d rather they planned for a total blackout and figured out what happened to hospitals and water and sewerage and food etc, than just left people to die. If we pay our taxes for anything, it’s to make sure those types of bases are covered. Tell people to buy and store their own food and blankets and go make sure we don’t have people dying in hospitals of getting infected because of our water supplies.

Sir Kill Alot wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:
You cannot make light of humanity’s reliance on energy.  A country or even a large part of it losing power for 7 days would be devastating.  The loss of life (from lack of medical assistance) and starvation would cause mass chaos which would lead to mass casualties. By day 4 you have social structure breaking down with looting of stores.  By day 7 you see the formation of gangs and looting of peoples homes.

-SKA

I don’t make light of the reality. What is shocking to me is that the public are so amazed that a country would ever consider planning for such a thing, and that discovering that their country actually does plan for things, their response it terror and hysteria.

I know I am somewhat unique in assuming that contingency planning happens and we are not told about such things, but the idea that many people believe nothing ever happens in the world unless it occurs on their TVs is staggering. It’s like they spend their entire lives just reacting as to a developing narrative, and the world for them is no deeper than what they see from day to day. When all of a sudden they discover that the world is just a little bit deeper than what they see on the surface, it scares the hell out of them, because it implies that shows them that there is more going on than they were told and that maybe that means they need to think for themselves.

One of the big polling companies did a survey and reckon that more that 80% of people don’t keep food in their home for more than a few days, and that only 1 in 10 people have enough savings to cover a £500 emergency. Maybe if they played D&D as a kid they’d understand about keeping provisions saving money.

Did parts of Texas loose power for more than a few days last winter? Did it descend into lawlessness and terror? Or was it just the odd day here and there, and over reporting of the odd darwinian who decided to light fires on their carpets to see what would happen?

sauromatian wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:
What's that word you're using, 'inflation'? The only people I ever hear use the word 'inflation' are journalists and economists. So, that is not part of the normal lexicon of the way ordinary American people talk. We only ever heard of the concept because some have taught it to us for political gain. I would have never used that word ever in my life before this election cycle. You are doing something people don’t normally do, which is not use the common tongue. Is it Gnollish? Mystaran Valley Elf?

Things inflate and deflate. Maybe it’s an education level or a UK thing. I don’t know. Tires get inflated at petrol stations and deflated by protestors. We buy little pumps to inflate paddling pools for our kids in summer. A paddling pool is a little temporary swimming pool because we have small gardens for the most part over here, and some people buy inflatable beds for 'glamping' which is like camping for snowflakes.

We do have a section of our society that don’t learn big words and mostly use words of one syllable, like ‘blow up’ or ‘let down’, but in the UK some of our population are still educated to a higher standard than is common in the other countries’ public school systems. It’s kind of like the full version of Microsoft English with the uncommon spellings and all the big words put back into it. If you have libraries still where you live they’ll have books on it, or maybe in some of the more prestigious universities if you have one of those near you.

As an adide... I remember when you could go to a public library and take out D&D books and read White Dwarf. I doubt our libraries have such things nowadays.

Tszii wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:This is surprising.

He was just being fishy sauce I raccoon.

I do make a point of differentiating between ‘inflation’, which is the increase in the supply of currency, and the effects of inflation, which are the increases people see in the price of goods and services. The two are not directly linked which is why most of the regular morons in our countries do not understand or believe that the championing the former actually creates the latter.

We are entering the economic season of schadenfreude, where people slowly begin to take their heads out of the sand and then empty their bowels without removing their trousers first.

Here in the UK we tried propping our economy up with a loose truss, but it failed, and now we're making a real Jeremy Hunt of it.

Deadlord wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:The way countries and the world in general handle economies is sad. Everything in the universe strives towards balance naturally, but we insist on constantly fiddling with things in an effort to constantly have "good" times and no "bad" times instead of letting things be.

What do you mean? If I am hungry & do nothing about it, a natural balance known as death by starvation will be reached, & I will become one with the universe. If instead I constantly fiddle with things to grow food or work for money to buy food, my efforts to constantly have starvation-free good times might succeed for at least a while. A bit sad perhaps, but such is life.

mbassoc2003 wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:...but we have found it’s easier to give the people what they want for a month or so, and then pull the rug from under their feet.

Do you mean Truss? Are you saying that Truss was who the people wanted?