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by falcon620 2930 days ago
There's been a quite generally raised awareness of the importance of civil resilience here in Sweden the past two years. The perceived threath of a Russian invasion (or perhaps more likely network-based sabotage) has been the cathalyst of this.

Being a "prepper" has gone from being seen as border-line psychotic behavior to "being a responsibile citizen". As long as you don't go over-board and try to prep for more than 4-7 days lack of electricity/water/food - then you're still seen as suspicious. Small steps.

There was also this campaign just a week or two ago - every household received a leaflet telling them to prepare for any incidents that stop public services:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/21/sweden-distrib...

This stuff used to be standard operating procedure when I grew up in the 70s/80s - all this stuff was printed in the annual phone directories that everyone receieved. After Soviet collapsed we stopped doing it though.

There's also been an unusually large number of outages of networked systems in Sweden the past two years, all over the place. Things like ATC systems, banks, media/cable tv distribution systems. Perhaps the official, public explanations are true (typically some kind of "human error" or "software update problem"). I suspect there's an adversary who is not very shy.

6 comments

How popular has the Norwegian series Okkupert been among Swedes? It seems war is weighing heavily on the mind of all the Scandinavian countries since about 2014 (except for Finland, of course, who have never stopped thinking of it).
The prospect of war weighs very little in Denmark, for the record. There was quite a shock in Denmark, when Sweden announced its 'war survival guide' a few days ago. There seems to be no indication that the Danish government is going to do the same, or anything similar. The argument being that Denmark is in NATO (Sweden is not).
Lol! I was interviewed about it by a Dutch TV team a few weeks ago and I had no idea what they were talking about! I got it in the mail last week, a little brochure called "What do to if war or crisis comes." I threw it in the trash and refused to take it seriously.
The value of being a part of NATO seems at best fluid with the current US president. That means that your NATO membership might not be as valuable as you thought it was. I'd even go to say as far as saying that Denmark and Norway are being complacent in case they depend on the US for reinforcements - with Trump at the helm.

On the other hand we all know that Trump will be gone by the next US election.

(Besides the current context I am incredibly frustrated with Sweden's unwillingness to join NATO. And just when were gaining some momentum to join, Trump goes and does his thing.)

So-so. I watched it. Enjoyed parts. Mostly cringed through it.

But just like the Danish/Swedish Netflix series "The Rain" in a similar genre the writing was painfully bad at times - I think this is what stopped it from being popular.

Everybody, anywhere in the world, should have at least 3 days supply of food and water stored at home for in case of emergency. Ideally, you should have it in a container, along with other emergency supplies such as a first aid kit, a radio, and a flashlight.

It is normal for emergency services or the military to take up to 3 days to get the essentials running again in the case of a natural disaster such as an earthquake.

When I used to live in an earthquake prone city, I always had a bag with a hard hat, gloves, a flashlight, and some other emergency essentials ready to go.

I live somewhere that is earthquake-prone, and watched intently when a large earthquake hit a city a couple hours away last year.

Food and water were supplied very quickly. But there were 3-4-hour long queues so you're better off with your own stock. In the following days, what people requested most be sent in as donations were the following "luxuries": toilet paper, diapers, and batteries to charge phones.

Could be self inflicted like Netflix's chaos monkey. You don't know how resilient your system will be in a time of stress unless you test it out
I actually bought a couple of huge water bottles and a battery-driven tiny radio recently, so I guess I can confirm what you are describing here. The radio after there was a false alarm of the official emergency siren, followed by news articles that recommended that the best way to learn why the emergency siren is activated, is one of the public service radio channels. I figured, better safe than sorry.
Being a "prepper" has gone from being seen as border-line psychotic behavior to "being a responsibile citizen".

My wife and I are outdoorsy types and are probably “prepped” for at least a week with no additional effort just from camping equipment and supplies...

There's also been an unusually large number of outages (...)

Maybe it's part of the campaign to promote self-reliance, like a vaccine for larger scale outages.

Physical Chaos Monkey. Maybe there is an ex-Netfix engineer in government.
Or a ex-member of the military. This[1] episode of Omega Tau aboard a Royal Navy ship really made me realize how much they train for Shit Happening - I think they simulated a fire or man overboard every other day. We civilians should probably do more of that as well.

[1] http://omegataupodcast.net/277-life-and-work-on-hms-enterpri...