Sunday, March 15, 2020

Small Town Ohio and Coronavirus

We went out to dinner last night and the restaurant was close to deserted. Some of the other restaurants in my town have switched to take-out only. There's no confirmed cases in our county, yet, but adjacent counties have a handful, so it's pretty likely that it will land here relatively soon.

Ohio's government took action to try to slow the rate of transmission relatively quickly. Schools closed, and many public events have been cancelled, so it's possible that the health care system won't be overwhelmed in about a month and maybe the end of the flu season and warmer weather will cause all this to blow over without much trauma.

The grocery store shelves weren't totally emptied out here. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the selection of canned soups was starting to dwindle, so probably many people started stock-piling goods well ahead of time. In the recent days, though, there's more items missing. It's pretty interesting to see what people are buying strategically--oatmeal, gatorade, canned goods are some obvious things to stockpile, but more esoteric "survival food" stuff is still plentiful--things like sugar and fat/oil laden food are still there, like chocolate. I think the supply chain will probably catch up to the demand pretty quickly--actually the opposite problem will probably arise, people now have a huge stock of stuff to eat, so they won't be buying much for a month or two.

The videos of people chimping out in larger cities are pretty common on YouTube, but those scenes are probably rare IRL. The videos of normal people waiting in huge lines in cities are common though.

The globalist faction vision of the future--people living in giant cities where everything is controlled by computers is just not going to happen. If it does happen, it won't last very long.

The long term past of humanity is probably the pattern of settlement that makes the most sense from a resiliency point-of-view. The super dense, centrally controlled population is the most vulnerable to disasters. Small, self-sufficient, mobile groups are far less vulnerable to disasters.

The "civilization tool kit" of man from ancient times through the bronze age and into the classical world was pretty small and portable and easy to recreate. Once it got relatively more complex, like the sewers and water supply of Roman cities, and it came under pressure, it failed.

Even in modern times, like in 1800 Ohio, it was possible to replicate it from raw materials available in the local environment. However, today, the civilization tool kit includes items that are very hard to replicate and that require a steady supply of energy, like integrated circuits and microcontrollers/processors. If a sizable fraction of the scientists and engineers who work at just a handful of companies were killed, or just a handful of buildings around the world were destroyed there would be no new CPUs for several years at best.

Today most people serve the system and completely trust it. A tiny fraction are preppers or system skeptics and have one foot in a different, more primitive world, and one foot in the modern world.

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