I have to take issue with this. If your salary doubles, your needs do not double along with it. $100K is right around the 80th percentile of US household income. That means 80% of households (~250 million people) in the US are living on less than that. Maybe you can too, despite your paycheck being higher. And if your household's take-home pay suddenly increases from $70k to $140k, see if you can fight the urge to follow that increase with your spending habits. Keep the old car, pay off your debts, and save for a rainy day (layoff, medical emergency, etc).
It absolutely baffles me that prevailing financial habits in the US seem to include spending as much money as possible.
Now you don't have to slum it in an economy class seat. You're now able to afford a real laptop. You can treat yourself to...
Near enough everyone does it. If you've ever thought "I'm going to buy the brand-name [pasta|batteries|phone|insurance]" you're susceptible too.
The thing is, it's not much fun living as though you were poor - cutting coupons, spending time working out which vegetable gives you the most nutrition per Kg, scrimping and saving. So for every extra $£€ you make, you can give yourself a short-term dopamine hit at the expense of long-term planning.
It's one of the reasons why, in the UK, we're moving to mandatory pension provision. Unless you take action, a fixed percentage of your wage will be placed into a pension scheme. As your wage rises, so will your long term savings.
I'm not so sure. Recently our dishwasher crapped out. I've already repaired it once, but this time something else broke and we decided we were done with it. So, time to buy a new one. I reckon myself to be a pretty good value shopper, but shopping for a dishwasher got to me. Knowing that there are many fewer manufacturers than brand names, I set out to find what I though was the best value. I wanted to find a good quality one that will last a long time and I wanted to pay less for it than an average consumer would. It was overwhelming, I'm sure I could have done a better job, but I had other things to do as well; I couldn't/wouldn't make this task my primary job. In the end we just punted and bought a Miele, a fairly expensive brand with a good reputation. I'm sure that given enough time we could have saved 30% to 50% of the money we spent, but it would have taken a lot more of my time and we risked paying too much for a substandard appliance.
I think that's the key. You stop needing to think about lots of things. There's a real cognitive cost of being poor.
Of course I did. The thing is, in many cases it's totally right. Smartphones are a good example - you really don't want to buy the cheap ones. Not if you value your mental health. One has to approach this pragmatically though. Branded pasta is usually little different than unbranded one, for instance. And branded clothes - that's literally making money on people's vanity.
> It's one of the reasons why, in the UK, we're moving to mandatory pension provision. Unless you take action, a fixed percentage of your wage will be placed into a pension scheme. As your wage rises, so will your long term savings.
Great to hear that! It's one of the few things that are better for everyone if they're opt-out.
This is true to some extent, but if I don't minimally optimize my spending it makes me guilty, not happy. I feel I would be giving the wrong signal if my money went to goods/services optimized for my cognitive biases rather than for actual utility (or estimated utility). The duty of voting responsibly with your money does not go away when you get richer, in fact it even tends to increase.
I also disagree with the notion that spending less means resisting the temptation to buy more things, or to settle for things that are worse than the best. It depends a lot on what you want. If you don't even think that you could be spending more, if you have a minimalist lifestyle and no expensive tastes, I find it can be quite natural and not at all frustrating to spend less than what you earn, even if you're not deliberately trying to save money.
I suspect it comes down to a belief that a raise entitles you to a better life, right now: so you go out and buy more expensive groceries, get a nicer car, etc. I was actually raised in a fairly poor family and it's a habit I picked up very early on; took me a fair amount of work to overcome this.
The trick here is to make savings part of the spending (or in other words.. "budgeting").
If you're an average American who works 50h a week, 50 weeks out of the year, wouldn't you want to feel compensated for that? And not in green paper IOUs but in goods and services?
Beyond having a rainy day fund and moderate retirement fund I don't really see the point in saving. You can't take it with you...
Beyond covering my basic needs and having some toys, I don't really see the point in spending all my income. Goods and services? I already have those - more won't bring me happiness.
Financial security means one less stressor in my life. A sunny day / early retirement fund means I can take more time off between jobs, on vacations, and be more aggressive about getting job terms I like. I can go out and have more experiences. I don't need to save up to buy the things I want, because I haven't wasted my money buying things that don't bring me happiness.
Not to be pedantic (but im going to anyway), the average full time worker only works 1700 hours a year. Not 2500.
Earlier retirement. If you lower your lifestyle, not only can you put more into savings, the amount you need in savings to maintain your cheaper lifestyle in reduced. Financial independence is a great goal to work for.
I am earning roughly triple what I earned 16 years ago and I'm living more comfortably but I'm just comfortable. I'm not living extravagantly by American middle-class standards. I drive an 11 year old, paid off vehicle. I live in a middle-class neighborhood, 15 miles outside of the city.
I'm living comfortably on money that I would have killed to make back then.
I went from an apartment to a house. Higher utilities. A couple of credit cards with modest balances. I had children. I started paying for health and life insurance. Contributions to a retirement account.
It happens gradually and it's easy to not notice, until you reflect on long term changes.
If my income tripled again, instantly, it would be a game changer. With my current standard of living, I could retire by 50. If it triples again but over the next 16 years, it would likely be a different story.
So with those thoughts, it almost seems prudent to just buy 1k in freeze dried food ( http://www.ebay.com/itm/1-YEAR-MOUNTAIN-HOUSE-FOOD-ENTREES-R...? ) which can last you a year if needed. The only other things you really need is water (tons of purification options out there).
The next steps are protection and information. You can get a firearm for about 500$ with ample ammo and a world radio with a solar charger for 100$.
I basically tried to approach it from the perspective of threat modeling / risk management for real life; and by that metric, incidents such as losing a job are far more likely than a zombie apocalypse. I have seen far too many people in the Silicon Valley discover that the hard way :-(
Because describing how to defend your home against humans can be legally risky, and off-putting.
With the exception of the actually crazy, people aren't actually talking about zombies.
It also injects a degree of humour.
I'll come back and post the link if I can find the reference, but apparently real life zombies are somewhat possible. A few years back (2008ish?), I read an article about a German scientist that was able to alter rabies so that humans don't die when they get it. The resulting claim was that they would become super aggressive and attack others, similar to rabid animals, and would create a zombie-like virus. Granted you won't see humans walking around with half their limbs off after dying, but I thought it was interesting how the claim was that it could essentially create a World War Z type of scenario.
Now idk how much of this is true, but I'm almost certain I read it on phys.org, which if I did, would lead me to believe that it's a valid article. I'll see if I can find the link tomorrow.
Now, humans are social animals - we naturally form groups. And the group which will have the most necessity is anyone without sufficient immediate resources. And who has the most resources? Why, the guy with 6 months of food rations. 6 months of food rations will feed him for 6 months, or my group of 30 for 6 days - which gives us say, 10 days to find more.
The real question in that scenario then, is how stupid is the guy with 6 months of supplies planning to be about distribution?
A much better risk-mitigation plan is this: either die preventing the catastrophe, or prevent it.
They also sell bulk quantities of food ingredients that are otherwise pretty expensive to buy.
it's an example of how the startup ecosystem is attempting to disrupt some of the areas of concern that fuel the 'survival culture'.
here's another example: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/10/built-in-brooklyn-gotham-gr...
I personally can't wait to see this urban agriculture technology arrive in every city coast to coast, so that collectively we aren't so dependent on "just in time shipping" grocery store infrastructure.
I do think that this day is on the horizon, but until then I personally try not to think of people as 'crazy' when they feel the need to get their beans, bullets, and band-aids squared away.
Simply being prepared for emergencies is certainly not crazy. Saving money for an employment emergency seems like the most real threat to most of us. But I guess that's not as much fun as stock-piling guns and ammo for a zombie apocalypse.
Don't forget limitless quantities of beer and jerky.
The Bay Area culture definitely has a distinct aura of invincibility to it, though; we have many young folks, including immigrants with no familial safety nets and a messy legal status, living paycheck to paycheck while working in a very volatile industry on exorbitant salaries. And all that next door to an active seismic fault =)
Elsewhere, especially in rural America, the prepper culture seems a lot stronger, perhaps owing to the echoes of the Cold War. It always shocked me that the movement is virtually non-existent in Europe (where I grew up); if you look at their history, they certainly have more to worry about.
For example when I talk to my 80 year old grandmother about what it was like growing up 20 miles outside of a major American metro, she speaks about canning, maintaining a very large pantry, community agriculture, raising animals, making their own clothing, hunting deer and preserving the meat long term, making their own bullets, etc.
My suspicion is that what you're observing in rural america is merely a continuation of the ordinary way of life that has always existed here. What I suspect is that over decades PR firms and major brands have executed a rebranding of the old ways, attempting to recast it as 'paranoia culture' or some form of political radicalism. Their campaign likely involves emphasizing the small paranoid faction of this much larger culture on their TV shows and pop media.
I hope that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory, because that's not at all what I mean, it's just an effective marketing technique. After all families who are oriented towards saving for a rainy day don't come into the grocery stores to buy the expensive pre-packaged foodstuffs which drive all the margins. Therefor in order to increase shareholder value you have to find ways to break down the traditional values (and way of life) so that it can be replaced with predictable consumer behaviors and 'brand loyalty'.
My point is that the reason why you don't see this in europe isn't because the behaviors are different but merely because the advertising techniques are different in America so the lexicon is different.
All of this is starting to change though. A new culture is forming thanks the Internet, and people are starting to care again, about issues like community agriculture. You can start to see it being recognized (in satire) even on the major TV networks. Their airwaves are starting to be jammed by our Internet meme culture, and as a consequence people are beginning to care, again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIWQE4ZpMWI
YES IT'S LOCAL GODDAMNIT
I always felt the US prepper culture is primarily driven by the gun culture, as it mixes with American individualism / self-made man mythos. There you are, alone with maybe only family to protect, as the society around you burns down to the ground. You have your farm and your shotgun, now you're the boss. You know you'll overcome any challenge fate throws in your way, and if some pesky other humans want to dance, well, that's what the shotgun is for.
Europe is less individualistic. And without guns. People trust in institutions more. Which means, if the societal collapse hits us, we're fucked. But maybe it makes the society ever so slightly more resilient. And it also means that, sadly, you can't make zombie/alien invasion movies in Europe - the protagonist won't be stumbling upon assault rifles in every other abandoned house. Though I really wish someone tried to make a movie like that - I'd like to see how it could play out in a place with less cars and much less guns.
The closest it gets is "Make friends with neighbors", but plenty more is possible. I did see the comment that many will "pray for the government to bail us out", but that leaves out the people who will volunteer to be part of the NGOs to help others, and suggests that we, the people, have nothing to do with the actions of the government.
It's very detailed on what you can buy, but doesn't give any advice on figuring out which are real worries, and which are movie scenarios. Consider "Respiratory and environmental protection", where "If you worry about releases from chemical plants or overturned ammonia tankers, 3M multi gas cartridges ($17) and half facepieces ($12) offer robust protection when sized and fitted properly. In such an event, it would be also important to develop a plan for sealing your home".
Why not recommend visiting the Local Emergency Planning Committee to learn about any dangerous chemicals in your area? That would give an idea of which chemical plants are nearby, and a better idea of how to respond. It may be more likely that there's a fertilizer plant nearby (as residents in Waco discovered in 2013) or gas pipeline (as residents in Adair County, KY discovered in 2105, and residents near Carlsbad, N.M. discovered in 2000) and you need to worry about explosion more than gas problems.
In any case, I've now looked through a few dozen news reports of chemical plant problems, and found no example where gas masks, etc. would be useful.
On the other hand, and using the recent news report about Flint as an example, it seems that occasional water and air testing for long-term, low-grade poisons would more useful and cost effective than worrying about short-term, acute events.
Personally, I would prefer to see things structured around known problems - what does one need should there be a heavy metals spill upstream of you, like what happened at the Animas River? How much money would you need in order to be able to move, and no one wants to buy your property because the well water on the land is now toxic? How should you prepare for an oil pipeline spill in your backyard, as the residents of Mayflower, AR (and many others) have had?
When would it be better to put the money into applying more pressure on the EPA and FEMA, for more oversight and more funding for oversight, than to assume that individual preparedness is the right solution?
BTW, as it stands, its discussion about what to do in case of hurricanes is nearly non-existent, mostly saying "If you own a house, especially in a region prone to earthquakes or tropical storms, you should probably have a sledgehammer, a chainsaw (with a charged battery or some fuel at hand), bolt cutters, and a pry bar." Chainsaws after Hurricane Andrew were worth their weight in gold - as part of the cleanup process. But if we're talking planning, then window storm shutters are also important, as is tree trimming before the season starts.
What it should really do is point to more complete resources, like http://www.ready.gov/hurricanes or http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/prepare/ready.php . Viewing the latter, I see it includes things like "Make sure schools and daycares have School Emergency Plans" and "Pet owners should have plans to care for their animals" which should also be part of any plan.
The whole purpose of part II is to go over some cost-effective purchases iff you have a robust basis to prioritize a particular threat and a rough idea of how you want to solve it. So yeah, for example, the mention of respirators has to be interpreted in that context; very few people can meaningfully benefit from a respirator.
There are also mentions of being able to board up windows in locations prone to severe weather, etc. I would really like to address your concerns and improve the doc, but as it is, I'm sort of struggling to pinpoint the nature of the complaint :-(
For example, it says 'For example, do you live in a 100-year flood zone?' but does not describe how to find that out. It doesn't mention the term 'flood map', or where one finds a flood map. Do you go to the library? Is it easy to find online?
I tried now for Santa Fe, NM. http://www.newfloodmap.com/mountain/ doesn't list Santa Fe county, and in any case I can't tell if it's a legit site or a value added site trying to scam money out of me by looking official and packing together resources that are freely available. I gave up trying to find it online - I think I can get it from City Hall.
Regarding chemical risks, as I pointed out, it doesn't mention the Local Emergency Planning Committee. Quoting Wikipedia:
> Under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), Local Emergency Planning Committees (LEPCs) must develop an emergency response plan, review the plan at least annually, and provide information about chemicals in the community to citizens.
Someone who is looking for a guide to help with preparation, and doesn't know to keep extra water around, is likely also someone who needs help to map out plausible risks, and could use a pointer to legally mandated resources that are supposed to be available to help with those risks.
Then again, if I don't believe the government is going to bail me out of problems, why should I believe that those government maps and government information is worthwhile for my planning? Are they reliable? What is the experience of others with that information?
As a case in point, regarding 'relevant risks', the text says "Although we are entering the realm of very unlikely events, if you worry about encountering an overturned chemical tanker.."
This would be an excellent example of how to do a cost-benefit analysis. A first approximation is easy - how many people have been killed or injured by a chemical tanker where a mask would have helped? What's the probability of that happening to the reader? What does a mask cost, including the need to recharge or replace it? If it's a 1:1 billion chance per year, and it costs $10/year, then that's saying that your life is worth about $200 million to you.
But if that's so, then perhaps other things, like storing important documents, or copies of important documents, in a safety deposit box is much more worthwhile. Or driving at a more sedate speed (the first paragraph of safety tip #2 is very true!) Or remembering to not drive into flowing water, which kills many more people every year than gas from an overturned chemical tanker.
> board up windows in locations prone to severe weather ... I'm sort of struggling to pinpoint the nature of the complaint :-(
My complaint is that the document tries to take on a lot, and yet does too little.
There are a lot of resources for many of these disasters. There's no way your document can cover all of the things to worry about with a hurricane. You have to point to more complete resources elsewhere. It's not a simple matter of "boarding up windows", since that's only one of several options. I mentioned hurricane shutters; my parents had corrugated metal shutters for the window, stored under the house because when a storm is coming, everyone is trying to get boards for their windows. While on the other hand, a hurricane is more predictable. It's okay to wait until the last 24 hours to fill up the tub with water to use for flushing the toilet, which is not an option in earthquake country.
Accept that your document will be incomplete, and point people to where to go for more information.
The most common major threats (tornado, blizzard, hurricane, flooding, wildfire, sinkhole (yes, I'm from Florida), earthquake, avalanche, volcano/lahar flow, tsunami, etc.) all have official guidelines for how to prepare for them. Use them, and add to them. Don't try to be an all-in-one solution.
I don't think funding watchdog organizations really fits the goal of the article.
The article also went over realistic and unrealistic risks and urged the reader to focus on realistic risks and not zombie apocalypse scenarios.
If I trusted FEMA or the Red Cross - which I don't, for reasons I mentioned - then I would likely face simpler adversities.
If those relief organizations were able to get tents, food, and water to New Orleans within 2 days after Katrina hit - which they could do if they were well-run and funded - then I wouldn't have to plan for possibly two weeks of self-sufficiency should a major hurricane hit.
Is it better for me to spend a lot of money on myself for something that isn't likely? Or pay less for something that is of overall more use for myself, my community, city, state, and nation?
This is not good advice everywhere. Here in the UK pepper spray is regulated by the same law as firearms.
Where's the guide for what to do in case of a solar storm that knocks out the power grid for a month when you're a resident of Chicago, or New York, or Los Angeles?
- As soon possible, gather fresh water. Drain the pipes in sinks and showerheads; if you don't have enough containers, fill up the bathtub.
- Have non-perishable food on hand (cans mostly). Mind the expiration date.
- Have a deadbolt (if you are worried about your neighbors).
- Invest in a good first aid kit and learn how to use it. They sell larger ones designed to live in your car or home (not the portable, throw-in-backpack kind).
Worth consideration is staying put, fortifying your apartment or house and working with neighbors as the situation calms down.
1) Become a certified emergency medical responder. It's a one semester course you can take at your local community college. It's the first step to becoming an EMT if you want to keep going. You learn things including CPR, wound management, dealing with broken bones, heart attacks, car accidents, transporting patients, even emergency childbirth. I enjoyed the class immensely. Now I'm a lot less afraid of medical disasters because I have a plan and an impressive first aid kit, and I know how to use it.
2. Become an amature radio operator. As a technologist, it's fun to get in touch with my roots using older technology. I've been working on being able to operate using battery and solar panels, which has been a blast to learn about and experiment with. I can also operate portably while camping, bouncing waves off the atmosphere and back either towards the horizon to talk thousands of miles away, or straight up towards space and reflecting off the atmosphere back down to talk within a 300 mile range (this is called NVIS). Learning and practicing these skills is awesome fun.
3. Camping, and having the food water and equipment in hand to camp for several days. We have a few 7 gallon water tanks we use for camping which we keep full, in addition to our always evolving camping supplies. We take frequent camping trips.
Doing these things is educational, challenging, enriching and fun! I encourage everyone to do it.
It's also worth noting that you can get a ham radio for $40 that's higher power and will work at longer range than the FRS/GMRS radios. The FCC limits FRS radios to half a watt, and ham radios don't have that limit.
I know a lot of lucky people then. It's absolutely smart to be prepared in the case you lose your job, but is it really that rare to make it 40+ without getting fired or laid off?
(I googled around and saw http://www.myapocabox.com/ , but to my mind that's more parlor trick or even just something you sorta do for fun if you're in that culture. I'm talking something more like where you put in $X/month, and unless you say you already have one, it starts you off with basic first aid, moves to other basics, maybe throws some long-term food supplies in after a few months, etc. Something meant just to make you robust against reasonable disasters moreso than something to help you recarve civilization out of the nearest copse of trees.)
It's important and useful to be robust against real issues like power loss for a week (it's happened) or other such basics, but it's hard to keep a list yourself and expensive enough if you try to prep for it all at once that it inhibits doing it.
Only you can know what supplies and know-how you will need for the specific disaster scenarios that you might encounter.
I'm sure you don't need more than 2 hours to make a plan and one hour a month after that to buy the things you would need. If you care enough you should be able to find the time.
I can see you're really chomping at the bit to attack, attack, attack somebody, but why don't you go find a better target? Or, failing that, stop jamming words in my mouth and then attacking those?
Pretty poor choice of references here. In terms of movies, "The Day After" is the most viewed movie of all time, and certainly one of the best references for the impact of Global Thermonuclear war and what happens next on an individual level if you even make it. Mad Max is a fiction as best that has about nothing to do with thermonuclear war (it just serves as a background to start the story, but you can't see any of its consequences).
A little shocked the author did not mention it at all.
This was in the late nineties, so long after the world was expecting nuclear war at any moment, so I have no idea why she showed it - parts of it she refused to watch, so I assume it wasn't just that she wasn't aware quite his brutal it is.
http://www.redcross.org/images/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m4...
It's useful to peruse publications of these agencies in depth in order to understand what the government and NGOs plan to do in the case of major disasters - when you're planning for scenarios that don't involve the government turning on you, you should understand what these organizations will and will not be able to do for you. Hint: while they will try very hard, do not count on government or NGOs coming in with plenty of supplies particularly quickly. ARC emphasizes being prepared for 72 hours without aid, and I think this is a lowest-common-denominator strategy. It will take longer when there is serious infrastructure damage, even assuming that everything goes to plan.
One of my major concerns with the prepper community though is that they frequently overemphasize your own property. The most common type of disaster to affect people, by a huge margin, is home fire. The most likely disaster to happen to you is your house burning down. So while stocking supplies in your house is a great idea, do not take it too far: be sure that you absolutely minimize irreplaceable items in your home. If your house burns down, have a plan for where you will go for temporary housing, make sure that you will be able to access money for food (don't keep it all under your mattress!), etc. Have a longer-term plan for smooth economic recovery. Important documents like deeds and titles are almost certainly safer in a bank vault than in your own home because of the careful fireproofing of these vaults. Anything of that sort that you keep in your home should be kept in some sort of fire safe (which should be watertight as well), but be aware that a cheap First Alert fire box will only be rated for less than one hour of exposure and probably won't last that long. You need to spend a lot of money for something with good fire durability.
first world problems :)
Keep in shape, learn basic survival skills suitable to your climate, and keep a small kit of portable tools. If anything catastrophic happens, enable hunter-gatherer mode and start migrating. Our species did this for 95% of its existence, you’ll be fine.
(FWIW I keep a few weeks' supply of food for my family on-hand, but I'm not interested in prepping for anything bigger. More here: http://www.alloutdoor.com/2015/03/11/doomsday-prepper/)
What is interesting to me is the degree to which collapse has gone mainstream. At this point I've seen prepping go from something that you didn't want anyone (including your spouse) to know you were into, to something that is the topic of serious, non-snarky discussion (with 165 points!) here at Hacker News.
I predict that at some point in the next 18 months or so, we'll see an article in The New Yorker about prepping that takes it seriously. Once the New York media scene is able to talk about it openly, it will have moved out of the realm of "crazypants stuff that we don't talk about here, except to snark at it" and then it will be time to go all-in on the stock market because we will have reached Peak Doom.
Anyway, I just skimmed the linked article but it seems like a very good intro. About the only thing I quibble with (so far) is the faint whiff of goldbuggery in the financial section.
The neighbors called (they are in their late 70s). Half a mile down a dirt road they hadn't been able to get out for 3 days and were getting a little scared. We picked up a few groceries (the store shelves were pretty empty as trucks hadn't been able to get into town) and parked on the highway and hiked them in. Then it was hike half a mile through deep snow to the car parked on the highway for the next two days until the county managed to get the dirt road to our houses cleared.
Very revealing experience. It's not a good idea to imagine technology or society is going to solve all problems in a timely manner. When things go bad on a massive scale, especially when it's unexpected, you are on very often on your own for a bit even in this day and age. It's a good idea to be at least mildly prepared.
- it's never reasonable : you prepare for the end of the world or a "multi generational collapse" not "just" a "little" earthquake or a flood
- you need a Hollywood budget : a well stocked retreat that will allow you to "survive" without changing any of your habits
- guns, lots of guns : I remember someone recommending having 10'000 (yes, ten thousand) ammo for each semi-auto carbine you had (no less than 2 per member of your family of course, not including handguns, knives, handgrenades etc)
- fatality is never an option : end of the world, multi generational collapse ? So what ? You just need to store more food, dig deeper for your bunker, and buy more guns (of course ;-)
In fact I believe it's the first time I read something reasonable about preparedness in English !
Tailoring a "plan" to fit your individual circumstances is probably the key take-away...
Putting yourself in a position to provide the big four--water, food, shelter, and security--for a month for yourself and those dear to you is not incredibly expensive or time consuming....
Has Nature been unfaithful to us?(!!) A mother must discipline her children. As far as I've seen, she does it out of love, even when it hurts. She simply wants her children to grow up, far beyond what limits and mistakes they currently make, preferably before getting burned.
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The number one thing you want is water or a way to get water.
Number two is food or ways to get food.
Number three is heating/shelter.
You get those three things and learn how to get them (hunting, fishing, foraging, etc) and youll be just fine.
As for food, to give us a comfortable buffer, we had an entire wall dedicated to 5 gallon buckets of freeze dried stuffs like egg, milk, beans, rice, basics such as that.
Water is best to have you own independent well, and a filtration device for us while foraging and a bigger one for local high volume water if there is no well.
These basics are what anyone preparing for almost any disaster or emergency should do.
Although, if The Passage were to happen all your preparations would be for naught!
For example in the paragraph 'Gadget Upgrades'.
A short google search brought up nothing. Any clues?
SF and LA were hit hard in 80s/90s by big earthquakes - that actually happened. i grew up less than 20 miles from northridge - i remember eating granola bars and boiling water after the northridge quake. this shit actually happened to me; i ate actual fucking granola bars that we kept in actual ziploc bags because our electricity actually didn't work and the stores were actually closed. we surely wouldn't have starved, but they sure did come in handy when you're hungry right after a huge earthquake. do you want to beg your neighbors for a snack?
since that era we've had 2 genuine city-level SHTF situations (LA riots and Katrina, more if you count 9/11 and lesser storm systems) and for some reason preparedness has become less of a concern. 20 years pass and people just forget. memories are short. not mine.
i know multiple people who had to defend their lives and livelihoods with guns. real, normal people who now work in tech like you and me, who had to stand on roof tops with guns, in the middle of LA. right next to downtown. imagine this happening in midtown manhattan, or market street in sf. it's sheer madness, and it actually happened. and i'm sure anyone in the other LA (louisiana) can tell the same kinds of stories. and where were the cops? that's right - nowhere to be found when the shit hits the fan.
it can, and will, happen again. i think as you get older you start to realize just how tenuous civilized society really is and how quickly it can revert to an animalistic shitstorm. i keep several jerry cans of water and canned/dried food in my place, and am capable of defending myself. people think i'm crazy when i tell them i have this stuff. i think you're crazy if you don't. i know exactly what it's like to be woken up violently in the middle of the night and find that everything around you has gone straight to hell.
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Timeline-The-Northri...
6:50 a.m.: Hundreds of gas main and water main breaks reported. Parts of LA and Ventura counties are without running water or gas.
Oh right, the experiment failed.
Too bad, too bad.
