10 Nov 2020

#SovietTough

I read an article a while back that keeps coming back to me. Thinking on it, reading it kicked off me learning vim and building the HomeLab:

My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse. The rhetorical device I am going to use is the “Collapse Gap” – to go along with the Nuclear Gap, and the Space Gap, and various other superpower gaps that were fashionable during the Cold War.

Watching the UK stumble between Covid and Brexit, my spinfoil hat is well and truly on for disaster preparation.

Soviet public transportation was more or less all there was, but there was plenty of it. There were also a few private cars, but so few that gasoline rationing and shortages were mostly inconsequential. All of this public infrastructure was designed to be almost infinitely maintainable, and continued to run even as the rest of the economy collapsed

It closes with a piece on ignoring national politicians, not even to make fun of them - fading them from view faster.