The book Eternity by Greg Bear had an interesting take on this. In that book (spoiler) there is an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia, which devastates the surface of the Earth.
But many people survive, and a society quickly develops post-war. But it is dominated not by those who were most individually prepared, but by those who contributed the most to their neighbors and communities.
There is some overlap of course; some preppers have a lot to give and do so. But the ones who isolate in compounds with their hoard for too long emerge into the new society to be met with scorn, or even outright violence in some cases.
I had not thought about it that way but it kind of makes sense. It’s easy to like someone who is helping you. And shared hardship can bond a group of people.
It’s a great book, in addition to this aspect (which is a somewhat minor part of it).
Enjoyed this comment. Vibes with an essay by Cory Doctorow about needing a “bug in bag” not a “bug out bag”, to run towards community to help versus running to the mountains, as you need collective action to survive.
I think survivalism can get a little bit solipsistic. Realistically, once you've survived whatever made society collapse to begin with your continued existence will depend very much on how much practical help you can give a community rather than abstract things like money or pre-collapse social status. We're social creatures to the bone, it'll likely be the most effective co-operators who will ultimately win out in a post-apocalyptic society rather than the most violent or the most self-sufficient.
I think of 'prepping' more as about acquiring useful practical skills you can offer the community in a post-apocalyptic society than storing tons of tinned tomatoes in a bunker.
I've always thought the way to prepare for / survive such hardships is to have a strong community, not some elaborate individualistic prepper bunker scenario.
Since we are talking about books I’d like to add “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy to the reading list. It’s almost unimaginably bleak but just completely incredible.
Here in Denmark, it's impossible to get more than maybe ten kilometers from a settlement of 500+ people.
I am, by local standards, comparatively out in the sticks, but I'm still no more than a few hours walk from a city of a 100,000. Even if something happened that wiped out 90% of them, that's still a lot of people who are likely to walk by here and want my food.
Prepping for just myself would be a solipsistic fantasy.
Yes. I am unfortunately not a doctor, but seeing a few up close, I think that knowing how to treat injuries and diseases will be much more useful, than any amount of guns, ammo, and food.
There was a Simpsons episode were they had a bunker but not for enough people.
Flanders had not enough space and was left outside. Then everyine started to emerge from the bunker.
People who think they want to survive an apocalypse so badly that they romantify a bunker live might not have thought through it deep enough.
I want to be protected from a fallout so I can move out of my region after the fallout but that means survival of a few days not month or years. And I definitely don't care much for lifing on a totally destroyed planet.
>But many people survive, and a society quickly develops post-war. But it is dominated not by those who were most individually prepared, but by those who contributed the most to their neighbors and communities.
This is exactly what all the "prepper" survival types don't seem to understand. In a nuclear apocalypse, your supply stores will be nothing but a resource cache for roaming bands of killers. And your supply of 50 guns with ammunition will just be an extra fun treat for them. The only way to survive is alliances, trade, and mutual defense. Life will revert to feudalism very quickly.
>On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina became the largest natural disaster in United States history. After the levees failed, it became the largest man-made disaster in United States history. This blog is a chronicle of what happened to myself and my family during those events. It is also a documentation of lessons learned from a survival and recovery viewpoint.
I think it delivers a lot more backstory on what happens when you don't prepare for something, which you don't get simply reading a how-to list.
This is a much more practical and realistic prepping guide than what a lot of self-labeled preppers tend to practice.
Suggestions such as getting in shape and building good relationships with your neighbors are great suggestions for both good times and disasters. It’s also easy to map these suggestions to recent disasters and see how people who practiced them
would be (or were) better off.
There’s a weird element to the prepper community that leans toward a sort of role-play: Some get into prepping because they imagine it will be something like a heroic disaster movie, where they’re going to need a lot of guns and ammunition and a lot of expensive technology gear. Maybe fun to buy and collect, but most of those things are useless in real-world situations where people really need shelter, food, water, and support of the community.
It is worth noting that even the worst disaster in human history, while sometimes toppling empires, failed to really destroy communities within less than a couple of generations. And after more than one generation a community changed, or migrated, more than it was destroyed.
The plague didn't do it Europe. All the earth quakes and other natural disasters didn't do it long term (immediate effects are catastrphic so). Famines come close, and even then communities rebuild and survive. I have yet to see a real world example of a Walking Dead like scenario. The dinosaurs and the asteroid maybe, but those dinosaurs left so little documebtation, it's a shame.
> Putting somewhere around 30-40% of your emergency stash into the stock market may be a good call.
> The fundamental rule is to not be greedy: within the scope of this guide, your goal should be to preserve capital, not to take wild risks. It's best to pick about 10-20 boring companies that seem to be valued fairly, that are free of crippling debt, and that have robust prospects for the coming years.
> It is worth noting that many personal finance experts advise against hand-picking your investments. Instead, they advocate a process known as "indexing": buying into an investment vehicle comprising hundreds of stocks, structured to represent the stock market as a whole. The proponents of indexing have a point: most people who try to pick individual winners in the stock market usually fare no better than an index fund. But in the context of prepping, I think this is advice is flawed. To remain calm in tumultuous times, it is important to maintain a firm grasp of the merits of your investments. One can convincingly reason about the financial condition, the valuation, or the long-term prospects of a paper mill; the same can't be said of an S&P 500 index fund - which, among other things, contains the shares of about a hundred global financial conglomerates.
Oh come on. He's advocating putting 40% of your emergency fund into the stock of a handful of companies. This is hard to take seriously.
I also disagree with his take here, but I think there is some merit to the advice of "understand what you've invested in".
It's fairly hard to personally evaluate companies in a fund - it is somewhat easier to evaluate a single company (or even 10 single companies).
If I assume he means "~40% of non-retirement emergency funds" I can let this skate by.
---
I also think there's some risk to index funds precisely because they appear like such low-risk investments. If the majority of investments are in index funds, I suspect there are systemic risks that we just don't understand very well yet, because the vehicle is so young. Whether that's low liquidity, poor capital allocation, fraud, etc - it's hard to say exactly what risks come with that market structure, since we have no real history to look at.
(side note - I'm about 80% invested in index funds... so certainly don't read this as me recommending against them)
For me, planning for a five day power outage in the winter seems like it's something that takes only a limited amount of effort and resources and could come in very handy indeed. Make sure you have enough water (and a way to make it potable), heat, food, light, 1st aid and communications.
Going all in and getting a year of supplies seems excessive.
For heat in northern climates, unfortunately there's only so much you can do (outside of a backup generator with a big propane tank). A wood stove/fireplace can keep you comfortable but you'll still probably end up with frozen/broken pipes.
But I agree with your basic point. Early on in the pandemic there were people stocking up on 6 months of rice/pasta/etc. In cities. You basically plan for relatively short outages or you plan for civilizational collapse which probably involves getting out of cities and preparing for people trying to take stuff from you.
Remember that these are the guys who coordinated the Corona and Ahrtal responses, and understand that if they say 10 days is enough, it is prudent to plan for 30 days upwards.
To start: have an emergency fund for 3-6 months' worth of expenses, be able to cook/eat/drink/clean/toilet and heat your abode for 3 days in case the power goes out.
Then prepare for 7d, 14, one month, etc: stop when you think you have "enough". Some will feel comfortable for more time and some less. One piece of advice I heard: make sure you have enough food in your pantry to survive to cover two pay cycles in case there's a hiccup with pay roll. Having your emergency fund at a second bank in case your primary one has (e.g., IT) issues.
Perhaps have a bag of necessities (clothes, toiletries) in case you have to evacuate your abode quickly.
Ot's funny how close you automatically get there if your favoured vacation style is camping. Even during those periods when you don't prepare for a trip.
One aspect that the article does not cover enough is the importance of training. Whether that's medical training, self-defense training, survival training or general preparedness training, training is what makes gear/supplies useful. Far too many people will purchase x, y, and z in order to be "prepared", but if you can't properly apply that tourniquet you bought a dozen of, then it is useless, and so are you in the event of an emergency.
Circa 2006 or so, I decided to start spending my free/vacation time on training across a wide spectrum of skills. My motto: "Always become more deadly, or harder to kill." I've learned how to do a lot of things that I will very likely never have to do, but if I do, I hope that I am more prepared than I would be without the training. As with any training, the skills are generally perishable, so you have to work to maintain competency, but, personally, I'd rather spend my time learning important things than wasting it on the bread and circuses provided as "mass entertainment".
Why not training in stuff like gardening (the food stuff variety), repair, house building, emergency medical care? Even in pre-feudal societies there was only so much need for "warriors".
The thing is, you don't have to be a Doomsday Prepper to just be prepared. It's about mitigating the risk of the disasters you are likely to face in your locality.
I lived through the 2011 Super Outbreak [0]. Following the tornadoes, we had no actual damage (and most places didn't, tornadoes are pretty localized disasters, even in big outbreaks), but we had no power for about eight days because the tornadoes tore up all the transmission lines that feed the town.
The biggest lessons I took from that were:
1. Have enough supplies on hand for the duration of the event. I now keep 10 days of food and water for everyone in the family. It's not a lot and it won't win awards - mostly shelf-stable canned goods and bottled water that gets rotated out regularly - but it will keep us fed and watered. Things like toilet paper, a hatchet, matches, a first aid kit, etc. All in my "tornado box."
2. Keep enough cash on hand to last you 10 days with minimal spending. At one point during the outages that followed the Super Outbreak, we went to a pharmacy to pick up some supplies. Obviously with no power it was cash only. They were "ringing" up by writing things down on paper and manually tallying up with a pocket calculator. We were able to get some essentials using the cash my wife and I had in our wallets, but we were fortunate because we usually don't carry cash. I now keep $500 in cash in a safe in the house.
3. Keep at least a half tank of gas in both our vehicles. Basically enough to get us a few hours away from town. These days if I know we're going to have a big storm I top off. That's enough to get us to our family that lives a couple hours away, should we need to bail.
4. Have a crisis communications plan. When the power went out, initially the cell network stayed up in a degraded form on backup generators. But when those ran out, we lost cell coverage. On the third day I drove about 45 minutes down the highway to where I could get a cell signal and let everyone know we were fine. My Mom was so freaked out that she couldn't reach us after the tornadoes happened that she almost drove over to look for us. Now, they know to wait 48 hours before worrying.
Now, it's easy to say "that was a unique event." And you would be right. The 2011 Super Outbreak was a "once in a generation" event. But I have lived through so many rare events in my life so far that it makes sense to be prepared for another one.
WRT fuel, it is logistically difficult to keep gasoline fresh and rotated.
BUT, if you don’t mind paying $20 per gallon, you can buy a 5 gallon sealed can of stabilized, pre mixed, chainsaw gas.
It is 50:1 and 94 octane - and it is absolutely safe and reasonable to run in any car (or generator, etc.) - it will likely be the nicest gas that engine will ever consume.
re: communications - in the events that cellphone and internet infrastructure fails, what are the viable alternatives? Are landlines intrinsically more robust (or they share the internet fiber)? Shortwave seems obvious, but there’s an obvious education/investment/network barrier (no one I would want to communicate with is a HAM).
Of course, there is a non-trivial cost to spending time dealing with this stuff, particularly the less likely outcomes.
As with any risk assessment, one has to judge the probability of certain events and act accordingly.
The thing that bugs me about this culture -- and I don't include the author of this piece, who sounds imminently rational and level-headed -- is that a lot of people in this space seem to want these outcomes. In some extreme cases, they relish it or see it as a forgone or morally good outcome.
We should be putting most of our energy into avoiding catastrophic scenarios, and making these outcomes less and less feasible. But I fear that it is increasingly difficult for people across the political spectrum and below a certain socio-economic line to not be extremely cynical about society, and therefore the future. The result is "prepping" getting more attention than building a better world.
But, many of the catastrophic scenarios are nature-made instead of man-made. I’m not aware of any way to avoid volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, drought, etc. unless you are suggesting that everyone move to someplace where none of these things can exist.
Yup. Also people who write things like CollapseOS, and many HAM radio people. They fantasize about being relevant and important, and their hobby is a way to indulge in those fantasies. No wonder they secretly want the worst to come to pass – it’s the actual point of it all.
That's why I can't spend time on places like the Collapse subreddit. There are many people that fetishize the idea. This clouds their judgment and predictive power, and you see so many poor predictions of outcomes of world events there.
I've noticed (from an external point of view) that 1/ many people use it for some kind of escaping (myself somewhat included) 2/ Fantasize about being the hero of a post-apocalyptic novelbut IRL
You put that beautifully - it really is the case that "normal" preppers seem to be totally relishing becoming the next Mad Max hero, roaming the wilderness with their stash of weaponry...
What's really great about this piece apart from the fact it isn't this ^ is that it is beautifully written...
I liked the book from lcamtuf "Silence on the Wire" , I used to read what this guy writes.
But then as i recall he started to work for google. Probably helped there with browser security and user tracking.
The author seems to be missing some important developments:
Written by lcamtuf@coredump.cx, Dec 2015, minor updates Jul 2021.
...
Pandemic. It's been a while since the highly developed world experienced a devastating outbreak, but it may be premature to flat out dismiss the risk. In 1918, an unusual strain of flu managed to kill 75 million people. Few years later, a mysterious sleeping sickness - probably also of viral origin - swept the globe, crippling millions, some for life. We aren't necessarily better prepared for similar events today.
> In the US in the 90s, your lifetime likelihood of victimization was estimated to be around 80%; the odds of suffering criminal injury hovered at 40%.
Any source? These figures seem absurdly high, and I say that as a former resident of NYC in the 90s.
I decided to run a binomial on it, because these sort of things can be quite counter-intuitive, and I was also curious! My only assumption was a lifetime of 80 years. And it turns out the magic rate to get a 40% criminal injury expectation (over a lifetime of 80 years) is if you're in an area with a violent crime rate of at least 6.4 crimes per 1000 people per year.
The FBI gives [1] a national violent crime rate (in 2019) of 366.7 per 100,000, so 3.7 per 1000. However, in the 90s the violent crime rate peaked at 7.6 per 1000 [2] and wouldn't fall below 6.4 until 1996. So the conclusion is that his numbers seem pretty much spot on.
Of course it's also somewhat misleading in another way though. Violent crime is not normally distributed and influenced heavily by demographics and location. Detroit has an aggravated assault rate (which is just one component of the criminal injury rate) of 15.2 per 1000 people, while Irvine, California has a rate of 0.2 per 1000 people. It's one of the many cases where the average doesn't really tell you anything at all about your own chances for an outcome.
For the most intense emergency situations: If you take up wilderness camping (hiking, floating, snow travel based) you accrue the kinds of equipment that can carry you through most realistic emergency situations. But, more importantly, you learn to use and maintain that gear to keep you hydrated, fed and warm. Beyond that it's a matter of knowing where to collect water and having or finding enough calories.
The skills and equipment acquired in this pursuit of fun is far more practical than watching youtube doomsday preppers tie 30 different knots for tarps or ordering a barrel of MREs.
> Cash on hand, a gun with ammunition, canned food, and bottled water.
Contrary to popular opinion, people generally pull together in disasters rather than society falling apart. Good book on what happened in various situations ( 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans)
What use is cash in the case of a true catastrophe? And I don’t see the benefit of having a gun with or without ammunition. I would never ever be willing to shoot another person (or even an animal), even to protect myself or mine. I’d rather we are raped, tortured, and killed than harm another person.
If you don't have to worry about hingry predators, large ones like bears or wolves, tigers and lions, I think an axe and a saw for fire and construction wood is a better alternative than a gun.
EDIT: Hunting, a gun can be used for hunting. If you know how to, if you don't it's still pretty useless.
I was thinking about this earlier. To me a high priority would be movement, be able to get out of the disaster zone and be able to move to safer locations.
"In the public consciousness, its portrayals have all the makings of a doomsday cult: a tribe of unkempt misfits who hoard gold bullion, study herbalism, and preach about the imminent collapse of our society."
snowwrestler|4 years ago
But many people survive, and a society quickly develops post-war. But it is dominated not by those who were most individually prepared, but by those who contributed the most to their neighbors and communities.
There is some overlap of course; some preppers have a lot to give and do so. But the ones who isolate in compounds with their hoard for too long emerge into the new society to be met with scorn, or even outright violence in some cases.
I had not thought about it that way but it kind of makes sense. It’s easy to like someone who is helping you. And shared hardship can bond a group of people.
It’s a great book, in addition to this aspect (which is a somewhat minor part of it).
toomuchtodo|4 years ago
https://boingboing.net/2015/12/21/a-survivalist-on-why-you-s...
https://boingboing.net/2008/07/13/postapocalypse-witho.html
BoxOfRain|4 years ago
I think of 'prepping' more as about acquiring useful practical skills you can offer the community in a post-apocalyptic society than storing tons of tinned tomatoes in a bunker.
btbuildem|4 years ago
CPLX|4 years ago
anamax|4 years ago
Compare Lord of the Flies with https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-... .
There will be a range of outcomes.
That said, my plan is to become Mormon.
hbarka|4 years ago
TrispusAttucks|4 years ago
A community whose members are all self-prepared and self-reliant is a stronger community.
In the disaster preparedness books I have read being the "lone wolf" was never advocated and was actively discouraged.
rvense|4 years ago
I am, by local standards, comparatively out in the sticks, but I'm still no more than a few hours walk from a city of a 100,000. Even if something happened that wiped out 90% of them, that's still a lot of people who are likely to walk by here and want my food.
Prepping for just myself would be a solipsistic fantasy.
tomaskafka|4 years ago
pasquinelli|4 years ago
> without salt nothing tastes like nothing
seems plausible i could gather enough to share without too much trouble. now i'm thinking of it, msg would be another good one.
Melio|4 years ago
Flanders had not enough space and was left outside. Then everyine started to emerge from the bunker.
People who think they want to survive an apocalypse so badly that they romantify a bunker live might not have thought through it deep enough.
I want to be protected from a fallout so I can move out of my region after the fallout but that means survival of a few days not month or years. And I definitely don't care much for lifing on a totally destroyed planet.
ramesh31|4 years ago
This is exactly what all the "prepper" survival types don't seem to understand. In a nuclear apocalypse, your supply stores will be nothing but a resource cache for roaming bands of killers. And your supply of 50 guns with ammunition will just be an extra fun treat for them. The only way to survive is alliances, trade, and mutual defense. Life will revert to feudalism very quickly.
cosgrove|4 years ago
>On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina became the largest natural disaster in United States history. After the levees failed, it became the largest man-made disaster in United States history. This blog is a chronicle of what happened to myself and my family during those events. It is also a documentation of lessons learned from a survival and recovery viewpoint.
I think it delivers a lot more backstory on what happens when you don't prepare for something, which you don't get simply reading a how-to list.
PragmaticPulp|4 years ago
Suggestions such as getting in shape and building good relationships with your neighbors are great suggestions for both good times and disasters. It’s also easy to map these suggestions to recent disasters and see how people who practiced them would be (or were) better off.
There’s a weird element to the prepper community that leans toward a sort of role-play: Some get into prepping because they imagine it will be something like a heroic disaster movie, where they’re going to need a lot of guns and ammunition and a lot of expensive technology gear. Maybe fun to buy and collect, but most of those things are useless in real-world situations where people really need shelter, food, water, and support of the community.
hef19898|4 years ago
The plague didn't do it Europe. All the earth quakes and other natural disasters didn't do it long term (immediate effects are catastrphic so). Famines come close, and even then communities rebuild and survive. I have yet to see a real world example of a Walking Dead like scenario. The dinosaurs and the asteroid maybe, but those dinosaurs left so little documebtation, it's a shame.
d23|4 years ago
> The fundamental rule is to not be greedy: within the scope of this guide, your goal should be to preserve capital, not to take wild risks. It's best to pick about 10-20 boring companies that seem to be valued fairly, that are free of crippling debt, and that have robust prospects for the coming years.
> It is worth noting that many personal finance experts advise against hand-picking your investments. Instead, they advocate a process known as "indexing": buying into an investment vehicle comprising hundreds of stocks, structured to represent the stock market as a whole. The proponents of indexing have a point: most people who try to pick individual winners in the stock market usually fare no better than an index fund. But in the context of prepping, I think this is advice is flawed. To remain calm in tumultuous times, it is important to maintain a firm grasp of the merits of your investments. One can convincingly reason about the financial condition, the valuation, or the long-term prospects of a paper mill; the same can't be said of an S&P 500 index fund - which, among other things, contains the shares of about a hundred global financial conglomerates.
Oh come on. He's advocating putting 40% of your emergency fund into the stock of a handful of companies. This is hard to take seriously.
horsawlarway|4 years ago
It's fairly hard to personally evaluate companies in a fund - it is somewhat easier to evaluate a single company (or even 10 single companies).
If I assume he means "~40% of non-retirement emergency funds" I can let this skate by.
---
I also think there's some risk to index funds precisely because they appear like such low-risk investments. If the majority of investments are in index funds, I suspect there are systemic risks that we just don't understand very well yet, because the vehicle is so young. Whether that's low liquidity, poor capital allocation, fraud, etc - it's hard to say exactly what risks come with that market structure, since we have no real history to look at.
(side note - I'm about 80% invested in index funds... so certainly don't read this as me recommending against them)
Tepix|4 years ago
Going all in and getting a year of supplies seems excessive.
As always, YMMV :-)
PS: In Germany, the BMI (interior ministry) publishes a free guide for preparedness at https://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/themen/bevoelkerungsschutz/zivil-... They recommend a 10 day food and water supply.
ghaff|4 years ago
But I agree with your basic point. Early on in the pandemic there were people stocking up on 6 months of rice/pasta/etc. In cities. You basically plan for relatively short outages or you plan for civilizational collapse which probably involves getting out of cities and preparing for people trying to take stuff from you.
DocTomoe|4 years ago
Remember that these are the guys who coordinated the Corona and Ahrtal responses, and understand that if they say 10 days is enough, it is prudent to plan for 30 days upwards.
Melio|4 years ago
After that a lot of people would dye sooner than later.
throw0101a|4 years ago
* https://www.ready.gov
* https://www.getprepared.gc.ca/index-en.aspx
To start: have an emergency fund for 3-6 months' worth of expenses, be able to cook/eat/drink/clean/toilet and heat your abode for 3 days in case the power goes out.
Then prepare for 7d, 14, one month, etc: stop when you think you have "enough". Some will feel comfortable for more time and some less. One piece of advice I heard: make sure you have enough food in your pantry to survive to cover two pay cycles in case there's a hiccup with pay roll. Having your emergency fund at a second bank in case your primary one has (e.g., IT) issues.
Perhaps have a bag of necessities (clothes, toiletries) in case you have to evacuate your abode quickly.
hef19898|4 years ago
notakio|4 years ago
Circa 2006 or so, I decided to start spending my free/vacation time on training across a wide spectrum of skills. My motto: "Always become more deadly, or harder to kill." I've learned how to do a lot of things that I will very likely never have to do, but if I do, I hope that I am more prepared than I would be without the training. As with any training, the skills are generally perishable, so you have to work to maintain competency, but, personally, I'd rather spend my time learning important things than wasting it on the bread and circuses provided as "mass entertainment".
hef19898|4 years ago
peckrob|4 years ago
I lived through the 2011 Super Outbreak [0]. Following the tornadoes, we had no actual damage (and most places didn't, tornadoes are pretty localized disasters, even in big outbreaks), but we had no power for about eight days because the tornadoes tore up all the transmission lines that feed the town.
The biggest lessons I took from that were:
1. Have enough supplies on hand for the duration of the event. I now keep 10 days of food and water for everyone in the family. It's not a lot and it won't win awards - mostly shelf-stable canned goods and bottled water that gets rotated out regularly - but it will keep us fed and watered. Things like toilet paper, a hatchet, matches, a first aid kit, etc. All in my "tornado box."
2. Keep enough cash on hand to last you 10 days with minimal spending. At one point during the outages that followed the Super Outbreak, we went to a pharmacy to pick up some supplies. Obviously with no power it was cash only. They were "ringing" up by writing things down on paper and manually tallying up with a pocket calculator. We were able to get some essentials using the cash my wife and I had in our wallets, but we were fortunate because we usually don't carry cash. I now keep $500 in cash in a safe in the house.
3. Keep at least a half tank of gas in both our vehicles. Basically enough to get us a few hours away from town. These days if I know we're going to have a big storm I top off. That's enough to get us to our family that lives a couple hours away, should we need to bail.
4. Have a crisis communications plan. When the power went out, initially the cell network stayed up in a degraded form on backup generators. But when those ran out, we lost cell coverage. On the third day I drove about 45 minutes down the highway to where I could get a cell signal and let everyone know we were fine. My Mom was so freaked out that she couldn't reach us after the tornadoes happened that she almost drove over to look for us. Now, they know to wait 48 hours before worrying.
Now, it's easy to say "that was a unique event." And you would be right. The 2011 Super Outbreak was a "once in a generation" event. But I have lived through so many rare events in my life so far that it makes sense to be prepared for another one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak
rsync|4 years ago
BUT, if you don’t mind paying $20 per gallon, you can buy a 5 gallon sealed can of stabilized, pre mixed, chainsaw gas.
It is 50:1 and 94 octane - and it is absolutely safe and reasonable to run in any car (or generator, etc.) - it will likely be the nicest gas that engine will ever consume.
You can store and use it for years.
Also, you can just use it for chainsaws.
EDIT: This is the brand I use:
https://vpracingfuels.com/product/501-premixed-small-engine-...
"Remains stable 2 years in the tank and 5 years in the sealed container"
germinalphrase|4 years ago
seanhunter|4 years ago
chasd00|4 years ago
jordanpg|4 years ago
As with any risk assessment, one has to judge the probability of certain events and act accordingly.
The thing that bugs me about this culture -- and I don't include the author of this piece, who sounds imminently rational and level-headed -- is that a lot of people in this space seem to want these outcomes. In some extreme cases, they relish it or see it as a forgone or morally good outcome.
We should be putting most of our energy into avoiding catastrophic scenarios, and making these outcomes less and less feasible. But I fear that it is increasingly difficult for people across the political spectrum and below a certain socio-economic line to not be extremely cynical about society, and therefore the future. The result is "prepping" getting more attention than building a better world.
irrational|4 years ago
teddyh|4 years ago
Trasmatta|4 years ago
poulpy123|4 years ago
dmje|4 years ago
What's really great about this piece apart from the fact it isn't this ^ is that it is beautifully written...
Friday_|4 years ago
He wrote some good open source tools thou.
jcims|4 years ago
1970-01-01|4 years ago
thematrixturtle|4 years ago
Any source? These figures seem absurdly high, and I say that as a former resident of NYC in the 90s.
somenameforme|4 years ago
The FBI gives [1] a national violent crime rate (in 2019) of 366.7 per 100,000, so 3.7 per 1000. However, in the 90s the violent crime rate peaked at 7.6 per 1000 [2] and wouldn't fall below 6.4 until 1996. So the conclusion is that his numbers seem pretty much spot on.
Of course it's also somewhat misleading in another way though. Violent crime is not normally distributed and influenced heavily by demographics and location. Detroit has an aggravated assault rate (which is just one component of the criminal injury rate) of 15.2 per 1000 people, while Irvine, California has a rate of 0.2 per 1000 people. It's one of the many cases where the average doesn't really tell you anything at all about your own chances for an outcome.
[1] - https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
giantg2|4 years ago
The 40% lifetime injury chance sounds a little high. I wouldn't be surprised if it was around 25% though. Obviously this is all anecdotal.
sushibowl|4 years ago
Uses data from approximately the 1975-1985 period, so not about the 90s.
prescriptivist|4 years ago
The skills and equipment acquired in this pursuit of fun is far more practical than watching youtube doomsday preppers tie 30 different knots for tarps or ordering a barrel of MREs.
hef19898|4 years ago
boredumb|4 years ago
throw0101a|4 years ago
Contrary to popular opinion, people generally pull together in disasters rather than society falling apart. Good book on what happened in various situations ( 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans)
* http://rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6444492-a-paradise-built...
It's an area / sub-field of study:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_disaster
irrational|4 years ago
hef19898|4 years ago
EDIT: Hunting, a gun can be used for hunting. If you know how to, if you don't it's still pretty useless.
Havoc|4 years ago
Everything is interconnected and incredibly fragile and correlated.
chasd00|4 years ago
orangepurple|4 years ago
What do we do when we are outcast from the financial system or it ceases to function?
erwincoumans|4 years ago
verisimi|4 years ago
"In the public consciousness, its portrayals have all the makings of a doomsday cult: a tribe of unkempt misfits who hoard gold bullion, study herbalism, and preach about the imminent collapse of our society."
Well, that hasn't aged well...
playpause|4 years ago
goodpoint|4 years ago
If anything, it's an accurate description of preppers. Together with the unsustainable individualism.
csee|4 years ago
ziggus|4 years ago