HN Reader

One of our biggest practical vulnerabilities is that our payment and electronic id infrastructure (nets, dankort, mitid) has been sold off to a private company (Mastercard) even though it was at one point a government owned and developed setup.

This is quite a fun app to play with: This link has some presets https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=55.675313...

How are people going to pay for things? With no power or network, card payments stop working, and so do ATMs.

Item #388293 of things that would never happen in America.

During the Cold War, even the Soviet Union had better missile defense and civil defense infrastructure than the US.

Feels a bit like cheeky marketing from Salling Group, when its just a concept years away from being rolled out. I don't see them running stores with sub optimal stock and other complexities, just for the good of their hearts. Or maybe they just looked at the odds and concluded that likelihood of a lockdown-like event is enough to make it a sound investment.

Without power they could use backup sources but without telecoms isn't payment going to be difficult to impossible? (except those who had sufficient cash before the emergency)

Three days seems low, but any resilience is better than no resilience.

Its not clear to me whether this is stores as in "shops" where you can go to buy things, or as in "storage" ie distribution hubs. Anyone know?

What pays for this?

If an emergency store costs 10% more to run, and emergencies are only 1 day in 10,000, then prices during emergencies would need to be 1000x normal for it to make business sense.

Unfortunately anti-price-gouging laws wouldn't allow that, nor would you manage to keep law and order in the shop when telling customers that a bottle of water is gonna cost them 2000 dollars/euros.

Having a government operated emergency stock and a military with the capacity to move it is how Switzerland does it.

And we stock coffee too, not just grain. :)

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/mandatory-reserves_why...

It's a very good idea. I wish we had good ideas in the United States.

>The idea is that no one should be more than 50 km from such a store and it should prevent hoarding/panic buying as people will know basic food will be available in an emergency.

I dont think that is how it works? That is assuming people wont flock out to buy everything in the emergency store. And do people visit it every day or are these "Emergency Stores". After all they need to replenish stock.

Or are these simply some form of marketing play?

Off-Topic: Its been while since I last visited a The Mastodon site and it seems a lot faster than before.

There is a regional chain where I live in Texas, HEB, that has a similar solution they solve via emergency distribution schedule. They found that environmental disasters can be profitable to operate at a loss and support the community because they are able to come back online faster than the competition and minimize disruption to regular operations.

Not sure if this is of interest but I was living in Denmark during the "announcement" that the country was closing flights as COVID was now being taken seriously.

Being somewhat of a "cautious" prepper mentality, though never having really done any prepping, I thought I would walk to the supermarket at night in a suburb of Copenahgen to get some extra tuna just in case. Mind you this was about an hour after the announcement say 8pm.

There was a queue of about 30 meters out of the supermarket of danish citizens, scared and ( possibly for the first time ever thought as a visitor I couldnt know for sure - the queue had ever been so long. As I walked away I could see through the window, that they were limiting the amount of people going into the store to a handful at a time.

And, very suprisingly I saw a normal Dane running round the aisle grabbing the milk cartons so quickly he knocked some onto the floor before continuing to run off down the aisle. Very movie like so to speak. Not something I ever saw in the UK during the same announcement a month earlier. Bear in mind this was also at night! A night food panic.

Well, the good news, is ( other than this one incident that lasted an hour or so), the Danes IMO handled the whole COVID thing with a stable level headed attitude, that night was the only mild panic I witnessed.

Months later they had a very honed and IMO fair, calm approach to testing and although teachers were forced to "take the vaccine" or "get into trouble" ( a teacher was expected to show they had taken it or a test or they simply coudln't be in school, thought the punishment was never explained), they were also the only country I noticed where if you were not vaccinated yet , you could still go to cafes as long as you had a "free" test in one of the many marquees around the city. ( To compare, in the UK for about half a year ALL cafes were closed, and it was mandatory to wear masks in public - not so in Denmark). One old lady started shouting at me whilst I drank coffee ( below my mask), on a train in the UK. When I asked her to calm down and stop shouting, that masks were not even worn in Denmark, she actually got extremely confused. (Just a memory.)

I just thought this was of interest. Clearly they are still trying to learn lessons. Good stuff.

EDIT> Sorry and my one funnny memory ( Im not complaining honest). Was a time in Denmark when it was (a) Cafe was open (b) You could go to cafe if you had been tested (c) You were given a literal FLAG that you would put on your table to warn other poeple you had ben tested but NOT vaccinated. A little white flag!!! Only once, I think that was at it worst, and about a month later I never saw the little flag again. Ah good times though.

I like anything that adds resilience to a system.

In case you haven't contemplated this logistics challenge before: the key is you need to stock shelf-stable products in these stores and at some point in their shelf life, transfer them out to other stores for actual consumption and back fill the emergency stores with fresh lots of new shelf stable products. You're just buying more shelf-stable supply once and then managing the transit through the supply chain with speed bump before the last mile.

Wait, so we're now approaching risk levels high enough that's its economically feasible for businesses to prepare for situations where their stores lose power, telecom, and resupply? Are we already preparing for land war across western Europe?

It's funny that these guys found a way to exploit the war to get free marketing from probably a warehouse expansion / warehouse-store hybrid they'd do anyway, and people think they are some prescient preppers. If war starts, 3 days supplies helps with effectively nothing and people will go to supermarkets to hoard anyway.

Does this just mean bags of rice/beans? 10kg of rice will store quite a while and provide many days of food.

Good idea. Smart that they can withstand 72-hour power issues. 3 days still seems short, but much better than current.

I'm with the mormons on this issue, who emphasize preparedness for emergencies. Typically storing up to a year of non-perishable food.