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).
https://boingboing.net/2015/12/21/a-survivalist-on-why-you-s...
If you have noticed, they do a really good job of responding to disasters. In fact, one of the funniest aspects, is that the Yakuza (Japanese mobsters) often are the first ones on the scene, and seem to take pleasure at beating the government response.
I suspect that part of the reason is that organized crime tends to have an incredibly robust infrastructure, hardened against unpredictable stressors.
Personally, I have no intentions of living in the type of feudal/fascist society that most preppers seem to yearn for.
BTDT.
I (legitimately) would rather croak.
If you have a bug-in bag you ought to have a bug-out bag for the simple fact that "Shit Happens."
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.
Best way to get into that "small community" is to have something to offer. Of course, it may not be a "bunker", but if all you're bringing to your "strong community" is another mouth to feed and some free time, don't expect the community to celebrate your arrival.
Indeed, they may not even let you in. It would be a time of strong communities, yes, but not the "let's all hold hands and sing kumbaya in our glorious unity"-style strong communities. It's going to be working hard together to survive. Those who don't have something to contribute aren't going to find themselves very welcome.
Basically, what I'm saying is, don't think "oh, I'll just have a strong community to fall back on so I don't need to do any prep". Especially if you're not already in one! If nothing else, prep today as your contribution to that strong community tomorrow.
(And I mean "prep" as the document does, sensible precautions to increase your robustness and decrease your reliance on resources that will be stretched thin in event of catastrophe, things that might actually happen, not necessarily piling 4 years of food into a bunker. Considering one of the "things that will never happen" just happened you have a more clear view than ever of what sort of things might go wrong, and, well, even if the virus is basically done there's plenty of reasons to believe the consequences of it are not.)
Also it is easy to have enough food to last for a year or two, but what after that? It is a lot easier to survive if you have a village with you. A village protects against loneliness/depression. A village planting fields makes it more likely not all of them fail (rain/hail is often unevenly distributed even across a small village). A village makes it more likely that useful skills survive - medical doctors (even without modern infrastructure they can still do a lot), various trades can often figure out useful things (if there are enough engineers and some sort of easy power source you might even be able to get an electric grid for your village). With enough people it is more likely someone actually knows enough about gardening to help you grow food.
What good is your strong economy if one weak link in its supply chain just ceases?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don't believe most preppers think or act the way you imagine. The gun crazy redneck with a bunker is a trope from movies and reality TV.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
Primarily a problem with old school copper pipes. Plastic / PEX pipes may be less of an issue:
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.
After that a lot of people would dye sooner than later.
* 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.
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".
No the user you've replied to, but it's not "either or" that you (might) imply. I would also like to emphasize, pre-Feudal society was as it was due to pre-Fedual technology. The AR-15 and Glock 19 aren't going to disappear with the COVID-23 epidemic or the nuclear flash.
One can learn basic marksmanship fairly well at a local shooting range, but something like Close-Quarters Battle or other necessary-but-uncommon (to civilians) training will require some amount of professional training. How effectively can you clear a room with a pistol or rifle (solo, partnered)? Are you aware of the effects of glass (home, auto) on a round?
Best not to learn these things the hard way.
Let us not forgot, in the original iteration of the American Republic, we (able-bodied men, at least) were all the militia. Even in this ideal "community sticks together" outcome in a SHTF world, you need to have some competencies in shooting.
To contrast, one can more casually learn primitive cooking or home gardening... at home. I, personally, practice martial arts... that's the gist of my daily fitness training.
Though I very much agree, the medical training is one you're going to want to go to a professional for and should not be forgotten amongst the High-Speed Low-Drag oper9r culture that co-travels in survivalist circles.
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.
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"
Where I live is six hours from the coast so hurricanes and tsunamis are not a threat. An earthquake on the New Madrid fault [0] is a possibility although a fairly remote one in any given year. The disaster I optimize for is tornado outbreaks, because it's the most likely to happen. Those occur fairly regularly every few years and are contained enough that I could get a message out probably within 48 hours just by going down the highway an hour or so to get cell coverage.
But to more directly answer your question, pretty much everything depends on power. When the power goes out you have a limited amount of time before backup generators run out of fuel. Even landline telecom systems need power at the switching end. A widespread outage that lasts more than a couple days basically means nothing works and you're reduced to using (like you mentioned) amateur radio or other point-to-point methods that don't rely on ground-based power.
During the Super Outbreak, the cell network stayed "up" for a couple days before going offline completely. But it was impossible to get a message out, most likely because of either demand or damage to the interconnects.
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.
What's really great about this piece apart from the fact it isn't this ^ is that it is beautifully written...
He wrote some good open source tools thou.
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.Any source? These figures seem absurdly high, and I say that as a former resident of NYC in the 90s.
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-...
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.
Uses data from approximately the 1975-1985 period, so not about the 90s.
> Uses data from approximately the 1975-1985 period, so not about the 90s.
Also, wasn't violent crime notoriously high during that period? For instance, my understanding was Times Square used to be gritty and a little dangerous, then Giuliani turned it into a Disneyland in the 90s.
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.
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:
Both make it clear that should something cataclysmic befall us all we'd be faced with the near-impossible problem of restarting agriculture. Modern, surplus-generating, agriculture isn't possible without modern society, starting with the basics like fuel and fertilizers (and everything else that's connected: the rule of law, supply chains, logistics, PhD-level domain knowledge and expertise, and so on). Those who survive "the event" would be forced into a life of sustenance farming for generations - and while you might think some semblance of modern civilization could be reestablished within a few years, consider that if everyone is sustenance farming for themselves, that leaves almost no-one left to do the actual reconstruction work, and that includes rebuilding fertilizer plants, fuel refineries, oil extraction, and agricultural machinery production.
Without anything close to today's industrialization and automation being restored within a few years (hint: very unlikely) it only gets worse: our modern society depends on an educated workforce. Under a "everyone sustenance farms for themselves"-scenario that means there's no-one to sufficiently educate the tens of millions of school and university-age people, assuming those kids aren't press-ganged into farming for their local district before they can even read or write, so with that outlook what hope is there to rebuild and operate oil refineries from scratch?
And "rebuild from scratch" is the word. While Russia might no-longer have enough strategic warheads to completely obliterate the northern hemisphere (at least for now), I'd bet a week's worth of my future postwar turnip ration that Russia has all of North America's oil refineries and related infrastructure marked as primary-targets, such is total war - so in the aftermath it definitely wouldn't be as simple as reconnecting some broken pipework and wiring-up a generator: the entire gulf-coast's set of oil refineries would be obliterated.
So, yes, you're not wrong: we will all band together, but I'll add that we'll band-together for a world of suck for 10-20 years before we mostly succumb to then-untreatable cancers, and our offspring will grow up as illiterate and uneducated serfs.
I must say, relocating to Chile or New Zealand is looking very attractive right now...
Not much long term in a civilizational collapse, but even then it might still be useful before everyone realizes what's going on.
> 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.
I think that's probably an unusually high level of commitment to nonviolence.
It's also creates moral dilemmas: allowing someone to be "raped, tortured, and killed" by others is harming that person. All your principle may mean in practice is the innocent are the ones harmed and the guilty are left unharmed.
Absent a complete ecosystem breakdown, game feeds itself. Obviously if too many people are hunting, there's the risk of killing off all of the game. Which is another excellent reason that is would be a strategy better suited to a less populated area.
It's hard to imagine a more efficient way (measured in money and space required) to supply food for potentially decades.
What a truly bizarre statement, and I seriously doubt you mean it.
EDIT: Hunting, a gun can be used for hunting. If you know how to, if you don't it's still pretty useless.
Everything is interconnected and incredibly fragile and correlated.
What do we do when we are outcast from the financial system or it ceases to function?
"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...
If you had bought gold 7 years ago, you would have doubled its value.
If anything, it's an accurate description of preppers. Together with the unsustainable individualism.