Covid-19, Civil Unrest Could Trigger Mass Migration in Post-Pandemic World

I interpret it as being armed and the neighborhood watch are reasons for GPs feeling of safety.

I live in a rural area and I’m unarmed and have no neighborhood watch. I grew up in areas with high crime where kids would get shot for their Nikes. I have zero need/desire for a gun. I used to be very pro-gun but could never really articulate why except that’s how I grew up. My belief now is that people who buy guns really have a desire to use them. And guns aren’t used to save lives they are for taking a life.

(I)

Context: I lived in Germany for somewhere around a year and a half, and have lived in Japan for the better part of a decade.

Gun ownership is effectively banned in Japan, and the Japanese have an amazingly competent, well-trained, and effective police force. Seriously -- they do policing right in so many ways. Germany, too.

I share this so you really understand where I am coming from when I say that I think every citizen that so desires should be armed. Moreover, I find the attitude of "nobody needs a gun" to be hopelessly privileged and naïve.

To give you some sense of why:

(II)

A friend of mine had an issue with an ex-boyfriend, here in Japan. He kept banging on her front door in the middle of the night, threatening her, the whole bit. He was an amateur athlete, and although I can handle myself in a fight, he would probably beat me into a pulp. She wouldn't stand a chance.

The cops put out a restraining order, and kept bringing him into the police station every time he violated it, but legally, they could do nothing until he actually hurt her. Moreover, he was Japanese, and she was not, which meant that the police were... less incentivized to help her.

This kind of thing happens everywhere. That's life as a minority for you.

She had no other option than to flee the country. No joke.

(III)

One day, I woke up to a massive banging sound. It was a bad neighborhood, and it sounded like people trying to kick their way through the outer mesh security door. My apartment was on the ground floor, in the back of my building

I called the police, but nobody would be able to show up for about half an hour. That's reality in a lot of the US. So I grabbed my Remington, walked to the door, and chambered a round -- the sound of a pump-action is very distinctive.

All of the sudden, the kicking stopped, and I saw through the side window what looked like about five people sprinting away from my porch. I was pretty shaken, honestly, and the cops never showed up.

The apartment owner had to replace the security mesh. Maybe another five minutes and they would have gotten through.

Don't know what they wanted, but I do know that they'd get whatever it was, because no way I could take on three people, let alone five.

I upgraded to a semi-auto after that.

(IV)

A gun is like a fire extinguisher. You don't buy one hoping you have to use it.

But if you need it, you need it, and nothing else will do.

The wonders of a homogenous society.

With the right wetsuit and a moderate level of physical fitness you could swim the Hudson River.

I tend to keep a motorcycle nearby for cutting through traffic if everything is jammed up after some unfortunate event. When you're making a decent software engineering salary it makes sense to begin being prepared for bad things IMHO. I don't go full prepper weirdo just a touch.

Good point about hospitals, and aid in general.

In a disaster affecting a large area (including adversely impacting aid from outside one's area), rural people will have to be more self-sufficient than city people, but they're also in a better position to be.

Rural strategic advantages I imagine include: lower cost of living, ability to own rather than rent (lower risk of homelessness?), land to grow food and have animals, space to store and build necessities, space for disease distancing, trade with nearby farmers when city supply chains disrupted, more likely culture of neighbors knowing each other and looking out for each other.

Some of my "college town" city-slicker disaster strategy (focused on economic, natural disasters like hurricanes, industrial accidents, and bad actors) didn't quite play out with Covid-19:

* Despite our money, we couldn't insulate sufficiently from catastrophically bad action by national leadership.

* One of our own big-money biotechs who should've known better actually created the initial superspreader event in Boston.

* The wildcard fact that we're nationally strategic (economic, prestige, and military tech) and also have students of much of the world's most wealthy and powerful here, didn't matter for external aid in this scenario. (Our governor even had to engage in cloak&dagger, to keep medical worker PPE we'd bought from being seized by national.) (And, though having the children of the wealthy&powerful here might be an asset for getting aid in local/regional disasters -- acknowledging the other side of how awful some disaster-hit poor areas of the US have been treated in pre-Covid recent memory -- that mattered less when "outside" was also struggling and had no aid to give, and maybe wouldn't have mattered as much anyway, after the universities sent students home.)

And problems that were predictable, if one had been thinking of pandemic as a likely near-term scenario:

* We're densely-packed, mostly in old apartments with quirks and problems, often with roommates, and relatively little open space.

* The substantial number of self-absorbed people accustomed to getting what they want doesn't help. For example, the several joggers who huffed&puffed past me on my own street's narrow sidewalk in the space of 10 minutes last week, only one even bothered to pull up a cloth mask as they passed. And generally only ~50% mask use rate among non-joggers on that same street last week, on a straight shot line between Harvard and MIT.

What so far has played out here better than it might've, I suspect is due to Cambridge and the Boston area having a lot of smart officials who care about doing their jobs well, a wealth of medical personnel and resources, a relatively progressive culture by US standards that resulted in a lot of attention being focused on helping the less fortunate here, the fact that the universities and colleges eventually told the students not to come back after spring break debauchery-acclerated pandemic spreading, overall passable public effort at distancing&masks, and a good amount of money to make that all easier.

(That's not to say that there aren't already countless family tragedies locally due to Covid, nor that unfathomable human misery around the world hasn't been caused -- only that the local situation could've been even worse already, if we didn't have some things in our favor.)

Excellent points, especially for the "medical" part of the storm. But against that, we must weigh the reduced likelihood of infection in a remote place.

Furthermore, I think most of the storm is not really medical. I'm feeling something more like the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" coming. Hard to know how to handle that, but perhaps best to seem like a peasant with few opinions.

And for gods' sake, stay the hell off of social media.

Buy a Boy Scout Handbook. It has good first aid instructions. Better yet, take an EMT class. A few months of evening classes and you are very well prepared for mishaps.

> The only dangerous protests were the ones with all the armed white people

Who was hurt? Did I miss a headline?

All mass gatherings are dangerous and all will cost lives. I'm dismayed that it's no longer "woke" to draw attention to this.

The French government did give 48h for people to choose their place of indefinite lock-down mid-March. Based on the limited statistics that I did gather over my ~50 employees based in Paris, roughly half of them went away from Paris just prior the lock-down.

More than a million people according to phone data:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...

Out of a population of 10 million so "most" is incorrect however it is a surprisingly large number.

27% of paris inhabitants left the city overnight based on phone data from 2 of the 4 french mobile phone networks.

I'm unsure of what the number would be if we added the other two phone operators and the people who wanted to leave but could. But this would probably not amount to "most".

source: https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/confinement-plus-de-25000... and https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356