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I mean outside the immediate disaster area. There the comm infrastructure should stay up long enough for that - at least, enough of it...

And New Orleans is representative of the whole?

Hm. Not too good then. You don't even have mandatory preparation training for the civil servants?

Not the minute. It should be sufficient to have a trained cadre (so to say) that can take over when needed.

What does 9-11 have to do with it? I thought this was just the basic stuff that had to be done anyway..?

It would eventually but not before someone breeds more horses or something.

Long distances are relative. Semaphore relays can do a lot of it in a pinch, anyway.

Slide rules would be very useful again.

No, not private larders, govt-maintained emergency stores. I do know that you have (or had?) some such at least for fuels, it was in the news a while ago...

It is politics then, by definition.

A local bookstore had a clearance sale recently and I found a cheap paperback edition of something (fiction) where the US had had millions of dead during an epidemic of some kind because they'd deemed quarantines unconsbreastutional or something like that. I thought it was at least partly a joke, but you sound like it could be for real ...?

You can get hot enough if you know how, with nothing fancier than wood and stone to start with. Sure, can't work tungsten and such, but most steels are workable. Expensive, but workable.

Iron, steel, bronze, copper, and such should be sufficient for a good while in this scenario.

You should have enough time to learn, is what I mean. Even from nothing but books. It shouldn't take more than a week or two of studying to have much better survival skills and by that time I'd expect that most people be sort of motivated ...

Yes, the digital communications have taken over so totally by now that there's no way to do it without computers. And that is part of the problem - there's no way to keep the current computers repaired without effectively global-scale economy to support the factories.

The older designs are much less demanding that way.

Comm is the Post Office's problem in this case. They are supposed to get the order slips to everyone in a day. The MoD pays them to maintain that capability.

We're again discussing things that happen outside the immediate physical disaster area.

The timescale is a bit weird. The Czars had tried to do reforms every now and then for decades already before Lenin showed up...

It isn't an especially well-known piece of history.

And the Czech Legion, originally financed and trained by the British, eventually fought all the way through Siberia, over land. They also consistently defeated more numerous opposing forces during that time.

Not by any consistent (secular) definition of "deserve" that I know of.

Now that one is rather hard to answer properly.

Because they effectively have a political party of their own, that's how.

Collecting wild berries, nuts and such.

-- #Not speaking for my employer. No warranty. YMMV.