FaceDeer

I ate the onion on this headline myself. The thumbnail was the first thing to clue me in, they wouldn't have literally showed a photo of the burning underwear if it was real.

"But why is it necessary?"

"I concluded it. Didn't you hear me?"

My point is that the "already fully prepared" requirement is extremely small and easy. "Having a car" is enough (or, in the event of one of these disaster scenarios, having someone else's unattended car somewhere near you). So bringing it up as an objection to the usefulness of this hard drive is not really significant.

You're overestimating the difficulty and expense necessary to support this device. You could probably power it from a car. A solar panel and inverter cost less than a hundred dollars.

That's not going to matter when the shooting starts.

And, best of all, walk among them in the continental United States. A vast, sprawling country of crumbling infrastructure just waiting for a saboteur's gentle nudge, awash in easily-accessible guns, and demonstrably populated by sheep who can be panicked into decades of self-destruction by a couple of buildings getting knocked down. Who haven't experienced war anywhere except as entertainment on their TV screens in centuries.

Here's hoping that even Trump's idiocy has a limit before it comes to that.

I've used the word "conquer" for this, but even then that makes it feel kind of like a board game.

I'm glad he got back to this literally days before a Canadian federal election.

There's an immigration process, go ahead and apply if you want.

There are an infinite number of things for which there is no evidence. Preparing for those things would be taking effort away from preparing for things that are actually real.

The first lunar astronauts spent 21 days in quarantine because we know that diseases are real and in the past there have been real examples of explorers bringing back new diseases from the places they visited. They didn't simultaneously get ritually cleansed by a shaman because there is no evidence of actual lycanthropy being a thing.

Of the possibilities, I find

How do you find that? Through some kind of rigorous analysis, or just an intuitive feeling?

As I keep saying, the human mind is not good at intuitively handling very large or very small numbers and probabilities.

You're analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can't do is analyze a risk we haven't imagined yet.

What you can't do is analyze a risk without doing an actual analysis. For that you need to collect data and work the numbers, not just imagine them.

Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen.

Yes, and all the causes that we know don't apply to any nearby stars that might threaten us. You have to make up imaginary new causes in order to be frightened of a gamma ray burst.

A quick Googling puts them around $50. The PrepperDisk is priced at $270 (Canadian dollars in both cases). So add a second drive and it jumps to $320, plus the cost of whatever additional complexity there is to the motherboard to support it, plus extra development cost for the RAID controller. And the device itself becomes bulkier.

Sure, this satisfies the handful of people who were concerned about that. Everyone else ends up with what's basically the same product but more expensive and bulkier. I can easily see the developers deciding that's a net loss for sales.