Considering you're talking about multiple properties already, I dont think your cost scale exactly matches everyone elses.

Even (especially!) in Silicon Valley you don't accumulate multiple properties by being spendthrift.

How much did you spend on your hobby equipment? Or your last couple vacations?

Even in pricey California you can buy a good NEW travel trailer in the 20' range, loaded, for about $15k. That will sleep four if they're friendly, two quite comfortably. If you're willing to go small you can get into the $7k range. Special order skipping the microwave, oven, and air conditioner can drop it further. Buy used for far less, if you know what to look for, are willing to accept the extra maintenance risks or put in a bit of sweat equity fixing it up, and you can get to silly price levels. (I wouldn't, though, due to allergies.)

The trick is "travel trailer", not "RV" or even "Fifth Wheel", and going small. (You can easily drop the price of a medium-sized house for one of the class-A land yacts.) Pickup campers, on the other hand, tend to live on the pickup truck because it's such a pain to remove it, so the rig might as well be an RV.

In addition to the price difference, the trailer/tow vehicle combo beats the heck out of RV in the long run: The house and the runing gear wear out at different rates - with an RV when one dies they both do. Unhooking the tow vehicle gives you a vehicle at your camp. Keeping it small also gives you the ability to camp in a lot more places than something large (like some federal and state parks of the more wilderness sort, which have twisty roads and small campsites tucked into out of the way places.)

The trailer/RV/whtever approach may not make sense JUST for earthquake preparedness. But if you find camping or cross-country travel enjoyable (and are getting a bit too fragile to do it with tents), using the money you'd otherwise have spent JUST stocking earthquake supplies can make the camping budget far more managable. It also lets you get two benefits for ONE chunk of your time getting things set up.

(I also find it's lots of fun to set it up with techie toys. B-) )

We have a self-contained travel trailer that doubles as natural disaster supplies. Stocked with canned and boxed food for weeks, 14 gallons of propane (always more than 7, since you swap tanks when one of 'em empties and top 'em off after a trip) can keep the fridge going for months, and we have a couple spare tanks.

40 gallons of fresh water are good for three days of camping WITH showers. In a natural disaster you can skip the showers and stretch it for a month or so. A couple hundred amp-hours of batteries (i.e. two of 'em) can keep things going for a while and can be charged from solar panels (or the vehicle engine) as well. (And we're just starting to convert the lighting to LEDs, for about a 8-16x improvement in power consumption vs. incandescents.)

The townhouse also has canned food for months and a case or two of bottled drinking water (as does the ranch house, which also has a well if we ever get a generator, windmill, or solar panels & inverter that can run it when grid power is out.) It also provides redundancy if the trailer is damaged, just as the trailer provides redundancy if the house collapses or burns.

Travel trailers are not very expensive. Set them up for a weekend's camping, park them far enough from the house that expected disaster cases don't zap 'em both, and they'll give you your "three days until help arrives" in style, or a month's survivalist roughing-it. They also have the advantage that, if they don't get damaged in the initial event or you have warning, you can hook 'em up and move to a safer or more convenient location. All "for free" if you like occasional camping, or cross-country ground travel without having to rent allergenic hotel rooms. B-)

What "we" are worried about is the rich cultural and political elite losing their seaside mansions ...

Well said, sir. (I already commented in the article so couldn't mod that up. I had to settle for "friend"ing you. B-) )

Also: In the spirit of "Never letting a crisis go to waste", it's also an opportunity for the 1% to incrase their power over the 99%, and find ways to rip them off. (Carbon taxes. Government mandated carbon credit exchange schemes, with markets provided, and billions in transaction fees raked in, by "entrepenuers" like Al Gore and Barak Obama.)

Where is the push to get men to become primary school teachers? Half of students are male shouldn't the same be true of the teachers?

Same for healthcare. With the exception of doctors most healthcare is dominated by women yet men are a large number of patients.

The Chilean quake was stronger but it was also deeper. ... the maximum intensity at the surface was less.

Also it was farther from large, internet-connected, population centers.

"Why do Californians think they can "feel" the strength of a quake? It's complete nonsense because you cannot feel its distance."

It's not nonsense at all. Bigger quakes last longer. The duration of the shaking is a good measure of the actual strength, and can be read directly off the seismographs, while more accurate estimates take a while to compute from these and other measurements.

That's why you see initial estimates as "duration magnitude", later revised to "moment magnitude" which more accurately measures the energy from measurements of the distortion of the underground structures due to the stress changes. You'll notice that it's SO good that the adjustment is usually only a couple tenths of a scale point - less than a 2:1 difference in energy.

The rip starts at some point along the fault and propagates along it in fits and starts, much slower than the compression and shear waves from the individual releases, as the motion from the relaxing stresses in the section that let go increases stresses in the next section. This keeps up until the effect reaches a point where the stress isn't enough (at the time) to make it let go. (You get aftershocks when the more gradual readjustments add "straw to the camel's back" and get it going again - or start one on another nearby section or another nearby fault.)

The strength of the wave decays with distance. But the duration increases as the wave takes multiple paths, scattering off underground structure. So a distant earthquake doesn't "feel" shorter than a nearby one. Longer-but-weaker. Also, the P wave propagates much faster than the S wave, is weaker, and doesn't "stretch out in time" much at all. Time separation is greater with distance. They feel very different. (Mnemonic: First the P wave makes you pee, then the S wave ...) So with enough experience one could ballpark both the strength and the distance from the feel of the quake.

For instance: Loma Prieta, a 7.1 moment magnitude (6.9 early duration magnitude estimates), propagated along aobut 22 miles of fault. It lasted 8 seconds, though as you got farther away the shaking got up to 45 seconds before it became too weak to be noticed. I was standing in front of Palo Alto City Hall when it got there, and my perception was first (P wave) "a truck is going over this overpass - wait', I'm not ON an overpass", then (S wave) "being in an airplane experiencing 15 seconds of mild turbulence." (Most ground-bound constructions {except for mobile and modular homes, which are built to be shipped on highways}, weren't built to withstand "15 seconds of mild turbulence". B-b ) I was listening to a San Francisco radio station: Seconds after the shaking started, the announcers got in two sentences (first about feeling an earthquake (P wave), then that it felt big (start of S wave)) before the transmitter failed (a bit into the S wave) - and the shaking was far from over.

The scale is logarithmic base 10, so a 1 point difference in scale is a 10x difference in energy, and thus time. This makes it EASY to guess the magnitude (if your sense of time doesn't distort to much from the excitement). A 6.1 would be 1/10th the energy of Loma P., so also about 1/10th the time, and Nappa to Oakland is comparable to Loma Prieta to Palo Alto, so call it a second and a half of the strong shaking.

On the other hand, for the first quake I felt after moving to CA I was nearly on top of a small one. (I think it was a high 2.x or a low 3.x.) Very sharp single shock - like a car hitting a concrete building while you're inside - followed by "echoes" as the wave moves on rapidly and EVERY building makes the sound of being hit (followed by a chorus of car alarms - shock sensors were common then). Sensation: Being in an elevator when it hit a misaligned section of the guide track. Three-stage perceptual distortion, as I realized that I was standing on the ground and my brain momentarily remapped my motion as a memory of the surroundings moving, as if they were painted on canvas scenery that was being shaken, then I realized it was an earthquake and it all remapped back - though the memory of the remappings was still there. (Next I wondered how much this phenomenon contrubuted to magical thinking among the cults California is noted for harboring.)

Maybe the cheap crap. I've pulled 7 year old data off of SuperDLT tapes.

Enterprises have been doing this with tape for 30 years.

In fact, modern tape technology probably has a higher "volumetric" density than BD.

Obviously, because everyone knows that DC travels great distances without loss and transformers love it.

What you get with Big Companies is lots of Lawyers. There is more money to be made doing exactly what the contract says then doing the job correct. If you do exactly what you are asked to do in the worst way possible you get paid once to do this and keep getting paid to support and modify.

Right idea, but we have two tabs, two laptops, two phones, etc. Everything that is fixed, yes, hardwired.

Yeah, and we should also ban municipalities from building roads because they discourage private investment in toll roads. All the roads, including the street in front of your house, ought to be sold to UPS. You'd have to get their permission to drive your car on their roads. Since they'd be private property, they'd be within their rights to make any arbitrary rules they wanted. They could ban certain makes or kinds or colors of cars. They could allow you to drive only to certain pre-approved destinations. And don't even think about trying to create a package delivery service to compete with them.

NASA doesn't build much. The only reason their employees do any engineering at all is so they stay somewhat competent enough to write requirements and evaluate contracts. Most of the money and work has been, is done, and will continue to be done by contractors.
Take Apollo. North American made the command and service module and second state, Grumman made the LM. The Saturn V first stage was built by Boeing with Rockedyne Engines. The third stage was built by Douglass, The avionics by IBM.The escape system by Lockheed.

Now since most of the integration work can be done by industry NASA has started to even back out of the integration role. Let the contractors build the whole thing. This doesn't mean NASA doesn't do anything. SpaceX, Orbital, etc uses NASA technology and experts all of the time. The difference is these companies go to NASA to ask for help where in the past the contractor had to pass NASA design reviews which slowed things down and made everything cost more.

I for one like this direciton. Launching rockets is proven technology. It's time for business to figure out how to make it economical. With these savings NASA can spend more on more payloads. If launch costs go down significantly then the spacecraft costs will drop as well. You don't launch a $10M spacecraft when you have to pay $200M for the rocket. But if the rocket costs $10M then you just might. 20 times the missions even if a bunch fail is still quite a bit of science.

I didn't say I had any trouble with the Internet, just with Netflix. Did you try Netflix on Tuesday evening? Also, from your name it appears you are in Oregon and I am in Massachusetts.