Government announcement today that we should stock up on food etc

Always a good idea to be self reliant to some extent, but i've taken to completely unplugging from all news media - only just returned to this forum after a good year or more - so this kind of thing normally passes me by. I saw some older chap down the local Sainsbury's today meticulously filling a trolley with tinned goods and stuff - assumed he was doing some kind of prep thing, maybe it was related.

From a government perspective, or a social organisation perspective it would probably be better for them to make some kind of local council level contingency planning and run local stores of food and supplies or people would be better off organising this stuff with their face to face communities. If bad things happen and it's known that you have supplies you'd soon have the unprepared locals at your door expecting support.

Individuals stockpiling goods in this day and age is probably counter productive, people don't coordinate with neighbours so will duplicates lots of stuff and not have resources that would be useful but more sensible to share then own individually.

I think the WW2 generation were better conditioned to prepare as they lived in small, face to face, high trust communities anyway - most of the time. Their lifestyles were driven by simple tech, systems and people they could understand. It's so much more complex now and the technology works as an invisible, magic box level for most people who don't really have a clue about how anything they rely on actually works. They also were not driven by the feedback loops of panic fuelled by announcements like this getting into grifters on youtube and social media, over  reacting for clicks and spawning more panic.

I think as a part of my ASD, I am prone to catastrophism and went on a massive slow and steady stockpile of tins and rice, water, pasta, etc. just out of my whirlpool of anxiety about all the things that could fold into that complex time and cause problems. The result is I'm still binning off out of date things I never wanted to eat in the first place and completely forgot about (I have ADHD too), and it was a big waste of money. If you're going to keep reserves you need to be doing it in a way that's managed, first in first out stock of things you WILL use on a day to day basis.

But yeah, I think the way forward with preparation is actually to build the support networks too. It makes more sense for people to share their skills and spaces and abilities to be able to actually work as a team rather than a bunch of atomised units.

Saying that. Some of the things people don't seem to think about is communications. How many people have a CB radio, still? Or know about meshtastic / meshcore and setting up local area, decentralised communications? We don't do this because we have this atomised lifestyle where we expect that some authority has the job of providing this stuff for us, but it's all achievable with some amount of coordination at the local level. There was no internet when I was growing up - I think we were better for it (the irony being I have worked all my adult life in IT and the Internet sector). A thought experiment: if we had a national internet black out drill, what would happen!? Can you imagine :) 

Problem being that coordination is a lost art. The WW2 gen are gone. I look around at some of the childish, ignorant, uncooperative and even adversarial living I see today and wonder if it would actually be possible for decentralised communities to work together any more?

I think today, we absolutely would see an population of people who fail to employ any personal agency and just stand back and let themselves be bullied and push around by the government. Having see the lockdowns, I can't really go back to my more optimistic view of society that I held before. So, given this expectation, maybe it would be better for the government to actually set up their own contingency plans for food and resource distribution from local centres and do the job properly?

Either way. I don't think just telling people they need to stock up is a good idea. Preparation for emergencies is an ongoing management and coordination task, not just people stacking their cupboards with baked bean tins.

Snowman said:

maybe it would be better for the government to actually set up their own contingency plans for food and resource distribution from local centres and do the job properly?

I agree with much of what you say, but this makes me shudder. In the chaos at the beginning of the first Covid lockdown, before the supermarkets set up priority lists for those of us who were their vulnerable customers, councils offered us food boxes. I turned down the offer as I would eat nothing included in them: baked beans, sweetened fruit squash, a bag of sugar, teabags, confectionery, Angel Delight dessert mix, creamed rice, sweetened custard, and long-life “one meal” portions of ready meals such as sausages and mash. The assumption seemed to be that all older people lived off unhealthy food and drank tea.

Yes, I was just thinking this from the perspective of those most impacted by such disruptions also, probably, have least resources to use to stock up on things and actually effectively manage such stocks too. So we'd have the most vulnerable people at the mercy of those who had a better ability to manage resources. I'm just thinking from a social safety net pov, that some kind of government minimum supply distribution thing would be useful here. I mean, what do I know, maybe this is happening in the background anyway? Who knows. Just seems to be a better idea to have both bases covered. A lot of the Covid problems were probably driven by people panic buying anyway. Something the government / media could have managed a lot better, initially. 

Yes, I was just thinking this from the perspective of those most impacted by such disruptions also, probably, have least resources to use to stock up on things and actually effectively manage such stocks too. So we'd have the most vulnerable people at the mercy of those who had a better ability to manage resources. I'm just thinking from a social safety net pov, that some kind of government minimum supply distribution thing would be useful here. I mean, what do I know, maybe this is happening in the background anyway? Who knows. Just seems to be a better idea to have both bases covered. A lot of the Covid problems were probably driven by people panic buying anyway. Something the government / media could have managed a lot better, initially. 

Snowman said:

A lot of the Covid problems were probably driven by people panic buying anyway.

Heh, and there no toilet rolls in the food boxes.