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Comment by jnorthrop | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention low probability of natural disasters: Earthquakes, tornados, wild fire, hurricanes, etc.

Half of Ohio is flat, and gets lots of storms that blow through the plains and prairies from the west, so not exactly low probability of tornadoes.

Source: I grew up in central Ohio. Public schools made it a point to practice tornado drills. In addition, there was an old Cold War-era air raid siren a block from the house I grew up in that had been repurposed and tested for tornado warnings. One of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9rRSY0dRIU

Edit: read about Xenia, Ohio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenia,_Ohio

> Xenia has a history of severe storm activity. According to local legend, the Shawnee referred to the area as "the place of the devil wind" or "the land of the crazy winds" (depending upon the translation).

> On April 3, 1974, a tornado rated F5 on the Fujita scale cut a path directly through the middle of Xenia during the 1974 Super Outbreak

> Xenia was struck by an F2 tornado on April 25, 1989, and again by an F4 tornado on September 20, 2000.

Even large, damaging tornadoes have quite localized impacts (max of maybe a mile in path width) -- and you don't generally do much more than stay up to building code in order to prepare for one. In contrast, earthquakes devastate entire areas and require substantial changes to building construction in order to protect against them.

The probability of a large, damaging tornado at a particular spot in Ohio is quite small compared with the risk of damaging earthquakes in other locations. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-will-o...

Tornado protection is mostly about avoiding damage in the periphery of a tornado. A building of that size can't realistically be protected from a direct hit of a major tornado. Proper engineering can protect a building from basically all earthquakes. Whether the contents inside are secured properly is a different matter and that's where most damage occurs.

you don't generally do much more than stay up to building code in order to prepare for one.

Interesting. I'm unfamiliar with building code provisions that are designed to mitigate the effects of tornadoes, which are arguably the most destructive force on Earth apart from an erupting volcano or a nuclear attack, on a semiconductor fab, which is arguably among the most sensitive and easily-disrupted facilities ever built. Any good sources for further reading?

You just get different natural disasters. Flooding that could damage your basement and foundation and prevent you from accessing certain roads is a regular occurrence, some people are always pumping out their basements every time it rains. A bad roof you could get away with in California where it rains 5 x a year could quickly spiral into more expensive rot and repairs in places that see heavy rains. Storms can still fall trees onto your house or car. Snowstorms often don't stop your employer from demanding your presence in the office or schools from closing because we are supposedly hardy in the midwest, and increasingly as the weather gets milder, ice storms that manifest as rain during the day but dangerous ice as soon as the sun sets and temperatures fall, coating your car in an inch thick layer of ice when you leave for work in the morning. And plus when the west burns up in flames, the smoke plume wafts east and settles down on the midwest, giving you the bad air anyhow. Speaking of air quality, if you have any allergies, the midwest is also not for you. You get slammed from pollen both from a variety of seasonal weeds, as well as from the intensive agriculture performed in the region.

Access to large amounts of fresh water.

Low geopolitical risk is probably one of the best factors.

Fun fact, Ohio was supposedly high on the Soviet nuke target list, because of Wright Patterson AFB, which houses the Air Force Research Lab (and aliens).

I have an old Soviet invasion map of central Ohio, marking all potential airfields etc.

There's a lot more to it than urban legends. A FEMA publication[1] from 1990 has a map on page 86 with assumed Ohio targets.

Tiny Waverly would have definitely been wiped off the map because of its fuel refining facility. There's a non-zero chance I keep my EMP-proof diesel truck running due to growing up in those times.

[1] https://www.jumpjet.info/Emergency-Preparedness/Hazard-Maps/...

A couple people asked so I snapped some photos: https://imgur.com/a/wlN5aAe

Looks to be a 1:500,000 topo map of the Ohio/Kentucky/WV border. You can see Columbus and I think Dayton at the top. Google translate via camera is a real charm here.

Apologies in advance for Imgur, but two other services I tried simply didn't work /sigh.

Why do you think this is an invasion map? It's just a map.

The small town I grew up in also had a specific Soviet doomsday theory. Which in hindsight, doesn’t feel very plausible.

In the wake of the George Floyd protests family talked about their concern that out of state “Antifa looters” were spotted driving down the interstate headed right for them.

I don’t mean to call you a liar, Im sure there indeed are some obscure targets, and your home might be one.

I do think it’s a fascinating phenomenon- this idea of small town obsession with their own destruction.

A quote from Terrence Malick’s BadLands goes something like:

> and if the reds ever do drop the bomb, well I hope they drop it right here in Rapid City (South Dakota).

In fairness to the parent poster, in the event of nuclear war an Air Force base with two runways longer than two miles each isn't an obscure target, it's just a target.

It's not just two runways it's the headquarters of the USAF Matrials Command since 1961 I think. Which is the biggest airforce command (by budget). They are responsible for running most R&D labs of the Airforce and for procuring new weapon systems and airplanes. It certainly would have been a major target. Dayton in many ways is still the birth place of new trends in aviation.

Guess which is a more important target to the enemy in the event of an all-out war: the runways, hangars, and fuel facilities or the research and development offices. (I mean, it's sort of an academic question if a well-placed enemy warhead makes it through...)

In the imagined scenario of a 1980s MAD first-strike, it's wherever the nuclear missile silos are. There's a lot of farmland around Dayton. I would not rule out the possibility that there is at least one nuclear launch site near Wright Patterson AFB.

The location of nuclear launch silos in the US is not a secret.

An Air Force base hosting one of the nine major commands doesn’t seem like an obscure target…

Lol, growing up in Ohio I've heard this same thing but for various different reasons over the years. Would be interesting to see an authoritative source if one exists

> I have an old Soviet invasion map

Can you please post this? That sounds so interesting.

https://www.sovietmaps.com/

Also I submitted that link as a fresh thread [1], because this admittedly fun rabbit hole has little to do with Intel and Columbus' sprawl.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30030346

I don't believe there's a town of any note in the United States that wasn't the target of at least one of the 30,000 Soviet nuclear weapons.

I don't think there's a city in the United States that isn't an active target of at least one of the 6,000 current Russian nuclear weapons.

I have a book that is all those old soviet maps - amazing how detailed they were. All hand drawn and they had detail down to individual houses and streets. Many time those maps were more detailed than the ones the US was making about itself!

Yep - one of my classrooms in Ohio was in the old fallout shelter. I saw the signs with radioactive label every morning going into the building. The location is now demolished.

Same. My high school was very near a GE plant in northern Cincinnati and I frequently heard how we were a target because of that. Seems plausible but based on other comments in this post, it may have just been cold war propaganda.

We also have a particle accelerator in Southern Ohio, I’ve heard it would be on a lower priority tier of things to nuke/otherwise destroy. Not sure how accurate the statement was, but I think it was from somewhere credible enough…

Wright Patt definitely has some high level stuff stored, I have a few friends who work engineering there.

"old Soviet invasion map"

Soviets had a concrete plan to invade Ohio? Wow. How were the troops supposed to cross the ocean?

>How were the troops supposed to cross the ocean?

The invaders would cross the ocean from an orbital path streaking in as multiple units launched from submersed platforms or silos in the Motherland raining down from heaven. Those invaders would not need to put a single boot on the ground.

They had more detailed maps of most of the US than the US had at the time.

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/

When I was growing up the rumor was that both sides had enough nukes to destroy the entire earth 10x over. I have no idea whether that is even close to true but at that point every city is a target because, why not?

Do you have a link to this map?

Low Geopolitical risk but high risk to personal liberties, especially if you are a woman. Look at Ohio and its slow decline from purple into red state. Gerrymandered to hell and back too to prevent this from changing in the foreseeable future, and a state democratic party that is powerless against the state republicans who have secured tenures for life thanks to their inventive mapmaking processes. Companies move to Ohio because a corrupt politician offered them a cherry deal on property like this more often than not.

Name exactly one personal liberty afforded to women in California that is not afforded to women in Ohio.

You must not be aware of the ongoing threats to abortion in Ohio?

https://www.abortionislegalinohio.com/

You can say that it's not technically illegal now, but it's unquestionably under assault in a way that it's not and won't ever be in California.

So you're saying maybe in the future there might be an issue?

Also plenty of people here want to ban abortion too. Tons of small counties have managed to prevent any kind of reproductive health clinics from opening or defacto forced them to close.

Makes sense to me to play to where the ball will likely be, not currently is, if your investment timeframe will be many years in the future. I believe Texas just effectively came to within an inch of banning abortions outright, but effectively they reduced people’s access to it.

My prediction is state governments will make a big difference in quality of life for many people.

I agree! Good luck with the state government of California.

I was going to say the same as you did: SCOTUS may very well make the legality of abortion a state-controlled issue, so that's definitely at risk in Ohio.

Ohio has no parental leave laws, especially ones that provide women with automatic 6 to 8 weeks of disability leave for the period before and after childbirth.

California does. CA also has other protections beyond federal ones for breastfeeding and other pregnancy related accommodations, and gives employees the right to sit at work if they do not need to stand.

I would not raise my kids in a state outside of CA to WA and NJ to MA and IL just for this reason.

> Ohio has no parental leave laws, especially ones that provide women with automatic 6 to 8 weeks of disability leave for the period before and after childbirth.

How is this a "personal liberty" thing? This in turn is probably violating the freedom of association that employers have...

>breastfeeding and other pregnancy related accommodations, and gives employees the right to sit at work if they do not need to stand

All of these trade one liberty for the other.

Of course, there is no free lunch. But nature dictates that if you want society to have workers in the future, women need to make a huge sacrifice.

So you can either worry about the small picture and employers losing a little freedom about who they have to employ. Or you can look at the big picture and realize that for women to maintain financial independence and still be incentivized to have kids, society needs to offer them something.

The first thing I thought about was tornados, actually. That Amazon facility in Missouri was just totally flattened back in December. Given the cost of manufacturing chips, it seems like it would be a huge loss if it was hit.

Columbus doesn't typically get strong tornadoes, although with climate change, anything is possible.

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