If we were actively in an open conflict with China with risks of sanctions, yes. But definitely not just because we found a spy balloon. Besides, with the supply chain disruptions caused by Covid I’ve made the effort to get stuff I need from China for the past three years, so in reality, I’m not waiting for sanctions to hit China anyway.

The rule of this forum is “This forum is a place for anyone to talk about prepping — not for preppers to talk about anything.”  Geopolitics is an interesting topic and it’s worth to keep an eye on it as it can have direct repercussions,  but my question still stands: how is this news influencing your prepping? What are you doing differently to prep because of this news?

Could you post a TL;DR next time? What’s the main point, and how is it relevant to prepping?

And how is this relevant to prepping? What different actions should we take because of this? I mean, foreign investments, and countries spying on each other is not really news.

These benefits will disappear when Biden ends the Covid national and public health emergencies in May https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/politics/may-11-end-of-covid-and-public-health-emergencies/index.html

If we really wanted to “follow the money” and take care of energy security, we’d go after lithium: Bolivia taps Chinese battery giant CATL to help develop lithium riches https://www.reuters.com/technology/bolivia-taps-chinese-battery-giant-catl-help-develop-lithium-riches-2023-01-20/ Chinese and Russian companies dominate in race to tap Bolivia’s lithium (paywall) https://www.ft.com/content/7c12bb7e-26fe-49b3-939f-376cc1ee76e2

I don’t have any experience with that but apparently it’s possible: https://www.wildmedcenter.com/povidine-iodine-solution.html I also found a research paper about it https://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(10)00301-7/pdf

A (few) lamps yes if it’s a big enough/powerful enough battery/generator. But definitely not a fridge. A gas/propane powered generator could do that though.

I don’t think a portable solar generator is enough to power your home, you’d need a fuel generator at least to achieve that. The prepared has a really good primer you might want to look at that https://theprepared.com/gear/guides/off-grid-power-101/

I don’t think it’s possible to foresee how long a grid down situation will last that’s why you need to prepare beforehand. The only thing that would make me think that the grid would be down for a longer period of time is if the grid was attacked during war vs a natural disaster for example. During war I would assume the grid would be down way longer than in any other scenario.

I could be wrong but maybe it’s not about you in particular and the choice of username example is just an unfortunate coincidence. But I agree that the topic is/was a little unclear: I originally wrote a comment which I then deleted because I realized I could have misunderstood the point. But the comment must have been seen and OP’s reply (below) makes me think that it’s about learning to discern the validity of a source.

This incident is literally the definition of unpredictable. 

The latter.

I think they’re using the charging 400,000 batteries simultaneously just as an aid to help people understand the storage capacity. The plant is likely just going to add to Europe’s stability, as per the plant director “I would say it’s not only important for Switzerland, it’s also an important plant at European level because it will contribute to the stability of the network in Europe and to the security of supply in Europe.”

I keep my food supplies in plastic tubs that have some kind of a seal and never had problems with rodents but I also make sure that nothing stored in there gives off a smell. Maybe I’m just lucky, or maybe my strategy works, who knows.

Interesting how everything is broken down into contamination, colonization, local infection etc.. What did you like about it?

Welp, that’s depressing. Never knew it was so bad.