alt Hacker NewsI see this page pop up with some regularity, and unfortunately the disasters mentioned within seem to become more and more likely each time I read it. Maybe I am just growing more pessimistic, but COVID-19 felt like yesterday and all the large scale layoffs certainly don't inspire confidence.
I renewed my home insurance policy recently and there was one clause along the lines of coverage being excluded for war/insurrection/rebellion/military related reasons. Previously I would have thought nothing of it. These days I read these exclusion clauses in the same spirit as the "problem space" sections listed in this disaster planning doc.
I'm in California, and I'm lucky that I've been able to renew my home insurance. My brother wasn't able to, because every insurer had pulled out of the area, and he had to buy insurance directly from the state for several times more than what private providers charge, and those rates are likely to go up because the state program that runs it is bankrupt.
If anything happens to the my house, it can take a year or more to get permission to rebuild it, and if fire or earthquake or flood takes out the neighborhood, the permitting backlog can take multiple years. My neighbor tried to build a house on a slope, and it took ten years to get the county to acknowledge that the engineering plans were sound, but by that point my neighbor was too old to build the house.
It's really common to have power outages here at least annually, if not more often, and that's been a problem for decades, but there's significant resistance to building new power plants, including solar and wind, which wouldn't fix the instability anyway, and a tenth of our power comes from the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, which is past its design life and we'd be lucky to get another five years out of it.
The oil refineries keep shutting down, we don't have any pipelines to bring in oil, and gas stations are required to sell a California-specific formula anyway.
Restaurants are closing everywhere, discount stores are closing, the 99¢ Only chain went bankrupt, eliminating one of the few affordable sources of fresh fruits and vegetables.
We've been so obsessed with NIMBYism for so long that we're losing our infrastructure and quickly approaching a collapse. A high paying job is necessary to barely scrape by, a generator is a must, gasoline shortages may soon become a problem, and electricity outages may grow from seasonal to regular.
I have contingency plans for all of these issues, but long term I'll probably just move to Nevada, Idaho, or Utah.