Current population of the US is 320 million. If 50% of the people get this in some way and the death count is 2% of all cases, then we're looking at about 3.2 million dead people. Let's see what it looks like in a year or so.

Only if you trade the crap fiat for bitcoin. Problem is it requires someone who will trade you bitcoins for crap fiat. Remember you can't just wave your hand and make more bitcoins by magical thinking.....

Having political "pull" helps when administrations are corrupt.

Yep. Time to start printing free money. For the "rich".

Ignore, trade it in for bitcoins, will be like reichmarks soon enough.

As always, it's a matter of balancing risks. Most disasters last a week or so, most power outages last a day or so. Within 2 weeks things are usually at a stable point, so a month's worth of resources should allow you to ride out the problems in a sense of style. Now if disruptions are for a year or so then yeah you need to start banding together with your neighbors/state/country and deal with things and having a month's worth of resources gives you the time to set that shit up.

Having enough land to produce food, having all the tools to produce food, the fertilizer on hand to produce it long term, seeds, plants that make seeds, and so forth can get very expensive to maintain. That's money that you can't use to buy bitcoin, invest in the future, and so forth. If the apocalypse doesn't happen you will be further behind other people, and if it does you may be ahead of other people but you will still be living in a serious crap-sack universe.

Preventing that crap-sack universe by having a reasonable government, getting involved with your community, and contributing to a better tomorrow despite the fact that some (many, most) people are fuck-heads could be a better investment over becoming the king of MREs.

So, there you go. You place your bets and take your chances with life. In business many people have placed all their bets on stuff coming from cheap china. This probably paid off well when times were good, but when bad things happen the question is did they save enough money to cover a service disruption? If so they have a crappy year. If not they go out of business. Jury is still out if China is dead for a week (on hand supplies used), a month (reserves), a year (suppliers) or a decade (you're fucked if you depended on them). We shall see.

Of course. Baby Boomers will *never* give up power.

He should probably call his insurance agent as a 21 year old will cause a lot of damage. But hey, why not?

Same here. Lived in an economically... complex.... neighborhood in the early 80's. It was like a 5 or 10 pound block of delicious. Can't remember anything as good since.

Ah childhood memories.

I will say from personal experience that the government cheese is fucking delicious.

You trust the government? This government?

Hm.

The Wow was in reference to 6EQUJ5. Still, rendezvous is one hell of a track.

See, buy some extra groceries, 2-3 weeks is all you need.

Oh and measure your neighbors and rank for caloric content. Easy peasy

I'm interested in seeing what the death rate per capita is in the various US states.

Will Red states suffer more due to their ignorance and love of "real facts"?

Will Blue states suffer more due to their Godless ways and lack of prayer?

Reality exists, time to place your bets.

Wow!

Probably it is fed by a breaker from the main box, and powers a second breaker panel downstream. In that sense it's just a big UPS, you hook your critical loads to the breakers attached to the unit, and when power goes out it continues to feed them.

Just like a big UPS.

For that no anti-islanding is needed. Sunny boy grid tie inverters are a different thing because they *can* backfeed the grid. Thus they need circuitry inside themselves to note when the grid is down and shut themselves off (usually because they suddenly see the 120 volts dropping like a rock as your little panels try to power the neighborhood. Not going to happen :-)

I hate screwing that up, but I think the math holds. watt hours is what everything should be measured in with watts alone just used for peak demand calculations.

Actually a small window AC unit (5000 BTU) can be installed with only a few hundred watts. That can keep a room cool and since it's only for a few hours a day it's not as bad as the damn fridge.

Ok, so you're grid-tied with the ability to run your own power island if things go down off the batteries. My system is tied into a Sunny Boy 1800 for the grid which can be manually switched into a MPPT converter that can feed the battery bank in the event things go odd. Manual, but works. The batteries are in my work shed, which has about 320 watts of solar directly connected to it to keep the shed running and the batteries peaked.

I have thought about getting a Sunny Island or a Trace SW4024 so I can automatically switch between grid and solar, but another option would be to just break down and put the Matrix in the house and wire it up to a subpanel that runs the fridge and other stuff. I'll think about that, but a 700 watt inverter is enough to run the critical stuff including the microwave.

Solar panels *are* cheap these days, I bought mine at about $2 a watt used for the single crystal ones. Modern polycrystaline are a bit less efficient (take up more space and are *heavier*) but that's not too big of a deal. Will think about it.

For me it's like seeing "On the Beach" play out in real time. Yep, Oregon just went dark, party on!