I think reality TV has ruined what normal preppers are trying to teach us.
There are many, many realistic situatiations, where you might end up without power, outside, or even locked at home (like going abroad when the neighbouring country is in a "green" covid state, and your government changing their mind overnight, how they decide 'colors', and classifing it as "red", and you need to quarantene for 14 days). Plus all the "i have the flu, I don't want to go to the supermarket today" situations.
Having some supplies at home (canned food, pasta, etc.) and some extra other stuff, a barbecue or something to cook stuff in, and an extra pair of socks & a shirt in your car is a very smart thing to do. Our grandmothers, living in villages had full cellars of food not that long ago, with sacks of flour, salt, and knowledge how to bake bread, and it was a totally normal thing to do and have (and people outside of big cities still do that).
And reality TV? Show a nutter, thinking about rapture, with a cellar full of some dry freezed crap, some 5 year food supply pack on a couple of pallets, still unopened, with an expiration date two years in the future, a huge amount of guns and ammo, and a "tactical" toilet bag, with a tacital, camo colored emergency toilet paper cutter, ...just in case.
This makes preppers look stupid, their prep cases look unrealistic, people having half a slice of toast and a jar of mouldy mustard as only food items in their house and people literally starving when their delivery driver cancells their order due to icy roads.
FYI.- This is what reality TV does for literally everything it covers. Pawn shops don't run the way it shows. Gold miners don't work that way (if they want to stay solvent), etc.
Of course not... but most people don't have a pawn shop and don't mine gold.
On the other hand, with prepping, (just to point at a weird, funny case), a huge amount of people were without toilet paper this spring, both due to media panic and not having an extra pack in the basement, for "just in case" scenarios (for me it was my gf using it all, and me being too lazy to go to store that day, so I have two packs (20 rolls) just for that...).
Because people here (in slovenia) watch international news, they bought all the toilet paper here too, and it was hard to get it for like three days (luckily, slovenia is small, and distributon is not hard).
And toilet paper is easily replaced by a bidet or a shower... food isn't.
Toilet paper is normally bought in multimonth increments because it doesn't go bad and isn't that large. How often do you buy toilet paper in a year? Maybe two or three times unless you're extremely liquidity constrained or unable to transport an 8-pack. The prospect of a lockdown prompted people to buy toilet paper off cycle which disrupted the whole thing by having everyone buy toilet paper in a month, instead of 1/4 of people, and then the residential demand increased while commercial paper demand dropped. It's not as simple as blaming a media panic.
I buy it tw, three times a month. While i lived alone, once, maybe even less. I don't know how large an "8 pack" is, but buying 10 rolls in a package is normal here, and usually you buy one pack, together with other groceries.
Media panic made people buy 5, 10 packs (full carts), because they saw americans and australians do it, and other be left without, so they hoarded the stuff.
I don't know how big your place is, but I just don't have room in my apartment to justify keeping these kind of quantities of anything. My partner and I buy an 8 pack once or twice a month.
I was in the middle of a lengthy move in March/April. Ended up at my new destination at the height of the panic buying/supply chain disruptions with nothing in my pantry and a single roll of paper towel. Literally as unprepared as possible.
Needless to say, I managed to stay alive... I completely stocked a new pantry with no problems, except flour and yeast, which was easy enough to find after a week or two of calling around. I did use paper towel as toilet paper for a whole week. Completely. Disastrous, let me tell you :) I did have masks that I use for wood working, so that was nice, but cutting up a shirt wouldn't have been the end of the world. And I did buy the very last thing of hand sanitizer at the store, so that was lucky, but in a pinch my 2 bottles of cheap tequila would've done the trick.
Tbh if I had spent years prepping for a pandemic I'd be pretty disappointed with how this one went down... afaict zero prepping was necessary.
Because it meant not contributing to the crowds. Not burdening the grocery workers. Not worrying about where to get masks, or gloves, or hand sanitizer. Having the right masks, and not having to wonder if a cut-up t-shirt would work. (Remember early on, that wasn't clear.)
Because preparation meant being able to actually stay at home during the stay-at-home orders, not "stay at home except for the grocery store and the pharmacy and the gas station and the warehouse club and the pizza joint", which largely moots the point.
You survived, which is great, but whatever you were doing to stock your pantry was riskier than sitting at home eating from an already-stocked pantry. It's a game of numbers and odds, and some of those same folks you were shopping alongside were sick, and did get others sick, and did contribute to the first surge in cases that swamped the hospitals.
Being prepared meant being able to completely sit out every one of those dice-throws. The more people who are prepared, the better the odds for everyone, not just the prepared.
Because going to a grocery store was and still is a lot more dangerous than usual, and it would be nice to have a two week stash of food so you could quarantine and then go visit your family or something without worrying about infecting them. I don't have a stash, and obviously I think going out to buy food is an acceptable risk, but I definitely would have felt better in March and April if I could have avoided the grocery store for a while.
> Tbh if I had spent years prepping for a pandemic I'd be pretty disappointed with how this one went down... afaict zero prepping was necessary.
I mean, come on. You and I have both ridden this out with little to no disruption to our lives, but hundreds of thousands are dead, and many more are out of work, unable to afford food, close to being evicted. "I'm fine so I guess it was never a big deal" is not an appropriate attitude.
You can say this about anything of public concern. We have had TVs in nearly every home for multiple generations. Expecting TV to be anything but a funhouse mirror is similar to expecting people to stop stealing.
The nutters are real - I have one in my family. At some level, this is just arguing about fringe enthusiasts lacking professional PR agents.
"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."
Well, this aged well! I'm glad to see this very reasonable take so far.
One thing that I don't see mentioned is a "go-bag" or "bug out bag", which I find to be one of the more useful preparations. Have a bag with some clothes, your documents, medication, whatever you might need if you need to leave your house in a couple of minutes notice for a couple of days. Super useful even if it's not a total life and death emergency, but you need to see or help someone, and won't know for how long. A lot of good advice here about what to put in it though! And a lot of useful advice on good skills to have.
One other small note: always have a roll of paper towels and toilet paper in your trunk in a bag. Just trust me on this one, you'll thank me later.
Also:
Headlamp
Ultility knife (aka leatherman)
Charging necessities for your phone
Some food that can be eaten cold (I use protein bars)
Water container
Note pad and pencil
emergency poncho
I also have a portable water filter; it wont get everything but since I live in Florida most likely there will be fresh water nearby.
If you're getting a water filter, I would avoid the Life straw and get the Sawyer mini instead - it's back flushable, has thread attachments and features a smaller membrane size.
Note: Not affiliated, just really like their stuff
Unless you really care about saving 1 oz of weight get the regular sized mini. Better flow rate and lasts longer when you really need it. I’ve switched back to the full-size for backpacking because the trade offs for the mini aren’t worth it.
I actually had an earthquake bag, supplied with several N95 masks. Around march when COVID started becoming "real", I felt very fortunate to be able to retrieve them and send them to my parents. This has in my view vindicated the necessity of having a plan and basic supplies in case disaster strikes.
Yeah, luckily I have a box of medical masks (though not N95), for flu season, where I will give them to people or wear them myself, so I felt happily prepared in the mask department!
Mostly for dust. A lot of the smoke/dust particulate matter from the 9/11 attacks has been linked to nasty cancers, even among civilians simply fleeing from ground zero.
Most N95 masks are for construction to deal with dust and harmful particles from insulation and other materials. These masks are noish approved and not FDA.
I am curious what construction workers used in lieu of them. Cloth masks isn’t going to give you the protection of harmful dust from finishing a countertop or doing wood work.
> I'm glad to see this very reasonable take so far
What, ultimately, were preppers better prepared for?
Anyone could make a cotton mask out of a t-shirt. The mask policy was a governance error. Having N95 masks as preppers did is as far off the mark from "cotton mask" as not wearing a mask at all, preppers would still run out of N95s, they'd still use a cotton mask, N95s were still overkill.
Besides masks, was there anything the public really needed that it could not get but could have stored inside their basement? Toilet paper? That's what you will summon as, "Preppers averted a life crisis."
How are you going to doomsday prep "elective surgeries" and "ICU beds?" That's what there were real shortages of. It's ridiculous.
> Having N95 masks as preppers did is as far off the mark from "cotton mask" as not wearing a mask at all,
No, it's not (overkill and inadequate are not equivalent).
> preppers would still run out of N95s
Worst case, preppers with N95s would have a window with more time to source/make masks taking pressure off and giving more bandwidth to deal with other concerns, of which there were plenty as the pandemic took hold.
> Besides masks, was there anything the public really needed that it could not get but could have stored inside their basement? Toilet paper?
Toilet paper, basic but nonperishable foodstuffs (there were shortages of all kinds of staples early on), and a number of other things (even things that were technically available were often not practically available or much more time intensive to acquire on short notice because of limited occupancy for stores and delays in online shipping.)
> Now a word of caution: beware of debt. Many of us are taught that owing money is normal, even desirable; indeed, for middle-class folks, some forms of indebtedness may be difficult to avoid.
I find that surprising. Perhaps this is the difference between growing up in a middle-class household vs. a working-class household, but personally I have seen first hand why debt is bad and been taught to avoid credit cards and debt like the plague.
Perhaps this does not fit the middle-class lifestyle and now that I am personally earning far more than my parents ever did I wonder if I should be less averse to debt, can anyone chime in with what the right balance is here?
Did you buy your house with cash or a mortgage? In some countries, mostly developed ones, the policies in place almost always make it a silly choice not to take on a large amount of debt to buy your first house. Even if you have the cash, it's always wiser to invest your money elsewhere and use the investment income to pay for the interest part of the loan.
Avoiding debt is good advice for 90% of the population who can't plan or understand long term commitments relative to their income level. When you understand and internalize that debt is simply a trade of cash flows (you get money now, they get money over time) that can be beneficial to all parties involved, you treat debt as a tool. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it's bad, depends on your situation. When your debt starts to accumulate, it means that your prediction of future cash flow was wrong.
Debt is a useful tool for investing in a business, or as leverage to afford a large purchase when the interest rate is particularly low (read: a mortgage).
If you want to own and grow a business that requires capital outlay or hiring people, there's practically no way to get started without taking on some debt. But if you're just working a W-2 job, have stable income, and live within your means, then the only "reasonable" debt to have is a mortgage and _maybe_ a car payment.
Plenty of people use debt wrong and that's why it gets a bad rep. Poor communities are often not taught proper financial management and may use credit card balances and payday loans because they believe that's what necessary to survive. Even though in the end, they are handing over a sizeable chunk of their modest income for no good reason.
Middle-class people wind up in bankruptcy because they use debt to fund luxury purchases that they didn't need and arguably couldn't afford. (Cars, boats, McMansions, etc).
Debt isn't purely good or bad, it is just another financial instrument. If used wisely, debt is a very powerful way of getting ahead financially. For example, the average person is likely never going to be able to save enough money to pay cash up front on a house, but they can very well pay it off while living in it. However, taking on a house payment you cannot afford is obviously bad. Likewise, using a credit card and paying it off every month is a smart thing to do, but carrying over balance is not. So, like everything else, there's a balance.
This is basically the opposite of prepping advice. If the world collapses, debts will all be wiped clean, you're going to feel like an idiot if you just paid off your loans and now we're all back to bartering. It would be much preferable to have a new and expensive car to barter away than nothing but the printout of a bank statement before the bank was liquidated by aliens.
I think this person just has a philosophy of debt and justifies it as "prepping" even though it's not prepping related at all.
I'm not a CPA or CFP etc etc. However, my personal belief is the right balance is borrowing money when the expected rate of return is greater than the interest rate on the loan.
Right now money is "cheap", whether it's a mortgage, or another type of loan interest rates are about as close to 0 as they can get.
There's a reason that wealthy don't call it "debt", they call it "leverage" because it can be a very useful means to an end.
Borrow to buy your house, aim for the monthly payments to be below a third of your income.
Apart from that, I’d avoid any other form of debt (unless it’s some weird game system like the US credit scores or cards, in which case play it if you want but be careful, if you ever trip up they’ll take you to the cleaners)
The right balance is what let’s you sleep at night. But I have seen people more averse to debt limit their economic growth. If your goal is to get rich, you need to be comfortable with levering up, because your competition will be.
Also, some debt is politically more favorable than others. Debt to purchase land is more easily bailed out and less risky than buying options on margin.
It’s also easier if you have supportive friends/family/spouse with high income so that you can at least have the basics in the worst case scenario.
> If your goal is to get rich, you need to be comfortable with levering up, because your competition will be
Or alternatively make something that doesn't have much competition. Here in Germany family business and artisanal work is still relatively widespread, and those businesses which have built particular expertise are very hard to outcompete, and many did so without significant debt, or sometimes debt at all. It just took them 30 years. They're private, often family owned, and don't have to answer to anyone, and they're not substantially threatened by globalisation (in fact they benefit from it) or competition because there is so much operational knowledge inside the company you just can't copy it.
It’s not pedantry. There may be some circumstances where strategic use of debt contributes to making you rich, but leverage is not a necessary condition for building wealth. Stating that it is gives people the impression that debt instruments are the road to riches, when in fact they are often the exact opposite.
Debt to purchase productive and appreciating assets is the most common way to get rich that I have seen.
I don’t really know anyone who got rich (as in you don’t have to worry about working) with their labor. It’s buying something with 10% down that appreciates 2-3x+ and then taking those gains and investing it in something else that appreciates and so on and so forth that got the people I know rich.
For real estate in the US, you also get to take advantage of the 1031 tax exchange and basically build your wealth tax free.
Always looks at the interest rates. Credit card debt can go over 20% APR sometimes and should be strictly avoided. A mortgage is more like 3% and can work in your favor since its better to pay into that than rent. I would tolerate auto loans as well.
Tolerate, maybe, but I avoid going into debt to acquire depreciating assets. Even if the loan interest rate is zero, the rate of depreciation needs to be accounted for, even though I don't get a tax deduction for the depreciation of my personal car.
I assume by "some forms of indebtedness may be difficult to avoid" they mean a great many people have student loans and mortgages.
Personally, I'm with you: the people who taught me to manage my finances had lived through periods where inflation and annual loan interest rates were 15%-20% - their attitude was that getting a loan to buy a car was a fool's game, and a sure sign you were living beyond your means.
At 15% annual interest I'm sure they were right - but after a decade of near-zero interest rates, I can understand why people these days are a lot less worried about buying a car on finance.
If you want a degree student loans are difficult to avoid unless someone else is subsidising your expenses or you decided to go to college after already becoming wealthy.
Mortgage is hard to avoid if you want to buy a house.
Some responsible use of car loans have their place.
I don't know you/your-situation but I've seen a hundred people talk about how they are debt-averse and give a bunch of credit card and maybe even auto loan related examples.
And they are all 2x+ their annual earnings deep into a mortgage.
If it's really life saving, break the lock and/or door.
You're right - locks are generally meant to keep out less committed thieves, but lock-picking is hard for the average person. It takes a lot of practice, good light, and a steady hand.
Picking a lock in an emergency situation seems impractical when you can just wrench the mechanism open.
Not just life saving, but you could potentially save very expensive property or business as well. We have been in a situation where electronic door locks failed in a power outage (hurricane) and we needed to access an email server behind those walls for an emergency retrieval of data. Everything was lights out, we were just trying to get the physical box out of the locked room. Ultimately had to crawl through ceiling tiles to circumvent the inoperative door lock.
I like how this is realistic, even though it is a frequent re-post. Do risk-based planning. You are likely to have an accident. Have a practical first aid kit a buffer of critical medicine you might need. You are likely to lose power for some amount of time, consider your plan if you lose power (and plan accordingly. A battery backup for your phone might be practical, a generator might not be). Understand you needs: you need potable water. Most can go days to weeks without food, and you can go months without a balanced diet. Don't plan for things you can't mitigate. Some things aren't survivable: recognize that.
Water in a water heater may or may not be potable. If the heater is kept below 140f, the water is not safe to drink. There's also a question of various soft metals in the tank itself as well as any connecting plumbing that may leech into the water. That's not a concern in a life or death situation, but you generally shouldn't drink hot water from your tap.
All in all, you're probably better off with iodine tablets or some sort of filter.
Best to just start noticing immediate risks, not rare risks. Immediate risk would be like losing a job that could make you homeless. Live in rural area with no med kit? Get one. Is stuff like that people should really think about and do, but it takes time to introspect where the immediate risks are
Have been following Michal's exploits (card carrying dad here, sorry) for almost my entire infosec career. Always appreciate his practical and rational take on things. This is no exception, great article and something I think allows people to think about the topic without getting sucked into the editorializing that typically goes with it.
I've lived in the US for around 6 years. When I served on the board of a co-operative apartment building, I was taken aback by the level of detail tenants and some board members made for themselves in the event of a major catastrophe.
How gleefully some sprung into action with their N95 masks and crank-powered radios when the pandemic struck! Unfortunately their foresight did not extend to the more pressing existential issues in the building, such as mould, fire safety, security, insurance etc.
In the event of a real emergency, preppers will be a convenient source of resources and supplies to be exploited by whatever roving bands are marauding the landscape. If you nerd out on preparedness, you're just increasing the chance that the local Blood King will turn your skull into a goblet when he comes looking for the stash of canned goods you bragged about online in the Before Times.
While I suspect a certain level of sarcasm was intended, a valid point for discussion does exist within your comment - The idea that preparing is merely forwarding supplies to your local warlord. This basically assumes a TEOTWAWKI scenario, which should be very far down the list of any preparation. It is always recommended in preparation circles to get to know your neighbors and integrate yourself into your local community. Under any reasonable set of circumstances, a well functioning local community should be able to stand up to any war lord types and would be the atoms from which a new society is formed.
The classic advice goes something like this - in a survival situation you will be killed by the first critical problem you can't solve yourself. Communities form for a reason and knowing the geography of your operational area includes the social geography.
I find it funny that the 'lone wolf' survivor is the archetype of a prepper. It doesn't matter how much food, water, guns or ammo you have. Isolation makes you vulnerable. You cannot hope to have a proper 'watch', even with a small family. I'd expect 'tribe' size groups to be much more successful.
There are a lot of people, some that I know in person, who live in a fantasy of surviving on their own. I've tried, through casual conversation, to get them to understand that you want to build a community around you for mutual benefit. From what I've seen it comes down to a few different things.
1. Some people have trust issues, possibly to a clinical level. They don't trust their neighbors to not be zombies etc knocking at the door to take their stuff. Ironically, when you spread awareness of preparatory issues through community building, you reduce the chance of that happening.
2. Some people are overly focused on one or two particular scenarios and 'optimize' their and preparations on those scenarios. E.g. A real-life neighbor has CBRN gear, firearms, and food but doesn't have a chainsaw or basic hand tools.
Like most stereotypes, the lone preppper has some truth associated with it. It really comes down to definitions. I'm not prepared for TEOTWAWKI by any means, but if I lose my job, or we get hit with a hurricane, or my car dies, or my house burns down, I've got reasonable contingency plans for those. Am I a prepper?
You forgot:
3. America has built this idea that you only have value if you are a rugged individual and doing anything for someone else or having someone else do anything for you makes you a devil worshiper who should be ignored and cast aside. Communities are worthless and only built so your lazy neighbor can profit from your "hard work" and you are the best person to understand your problems and needs
Well, obviously, the answer is a large family. I have 12 kids. Keeping watch should be easy.
Dogs can help. There is a trade-off to be had. Larger dogs can actively participate in defense, but they require lots of food. Geese might be a better option; they seem to be happy eating grass.
Attackers have the element of surprise. Unless you are part of a group yourself, you cannot hope to have enough people to keep a sufficient watch. The isolated 'living off the land' types with big stockpiles of supplies would be easy targets.
You have to sleep. You have to get water and maintain certain other things outside your home from time to time. You may get sick and need additional rest. Or to go and get firewood etc.
If 10 people really really want your food and supplies, they will burn you out or crash a vehicle into your home, or drop a tree on it. Alone you are nothing, you are much more in a community.
Think minute men vs a lone wolf. It is no contest.
Build a better home, learning from the story Three Little Pigs. Don't build from straw or sticks.
See https://www.monolithic.org/ for the right way to build. Crashing a vehicle does nothing. One of those homes, at the bottom of a hill, withstood a run-away 18-wheeler with only cosmetic damage. Fire could damage a layer of insulation, but only if the dome isn't covered in stucco or better. Get the impact-resistant windows plus shutters, and get the tornado-resistant door.
Robbers will choose the easyiest route. They just want stuff and not assasinate specifically someone, they will rob somebody other if they find a hard target. Probably somebody like you. It works the same with muggings. 2 people is enough to get some sleep and run errands.
The thing is, bad guys have guns too. You can't really defend against many thugs if they take you by surprise. Somebody could just wait somewhere near you house and snipe you, it's impossible to detect everything all the time if you leave your house or go near windows even once. And bad guys can use even explosives to break into your house.
Don't get me wrong though, since guns are extremely useful for defense and most of the bad guys aren't very tough. Surviving without a community in a serious scenario is just impossible.
How often are those preppers actually trained to take on several armed attackers?
It's not often. Having ten firearms and a million bullets doesn't help you much if you're a semi-crazed loner who vastly overestimates your abilities and usefullness
> In the event of a real emergency, preppers will be a convenient source of resources and supplies to be exploited by whatever roving bands are marauding the landscape. If you nerd out on preparedness, you're just increasing the chance that the local Blood King will turn your skull into a goblet when he comes looking for the stash of canned goods you bragged about online in the Before Times.
That's why meatspace social networking is part of prepping for some people: they recognize that, if there is a collapse, the way to survive isn't just to have stuff for yourself, its to have a well-prepared tribe. To be (well, hopefully kinder and gentler than the title sounds, for most preppers who take this strategy) the Blood King, rather than worry about him.
Yeah, usually. It's a common trope, but also a pretty tired one.
We have a pretty long history of plague, famine, war, and other "apocalyptic" scenarios, and in almost all accounts, people tend to help each other, and most would die of hunger rather than steal from an innocent person.
The main problem is that what we are very good at is building narratives that portray some class of "others" as not-so-innocent, and therefore, deserving all the pillage, rape, and murder we can muster. That's variously the neighboring nation, some minority ethnic group, political opponents, the rich, the clergy... you name them, there's some brutal revolution or war targeting 'em.
So, basically, the worst-case scenario is ending up on the wrong side of the pitchfork if / when the revolution comes. Something that, quite frankly, the Silicon Valley should be mindful of.
As someone who's been "prepping" for years, I got a few apologies after the pandemic began by people who used to think I was nuts.
However, I think the reason they thought I was nuts wasn't because I was doing anything that was nuts; having extra food;clothing;water;medicine, a "bug out" bag, and some firearms isn't really extreme in any way.
The problem with prepping is the term "prepping" itself, especially its association with "doomsday prepping", which is mostly an invention of the sensationalist media. Sure, such preppers do exist, but they are an extreme minority. The media focuses on them because they are the most entertaining. Practical preparedness is boring, at least in the TV sense. The average prepper is more concerned with weather events(inc. fires, earthquakes), civil unrest, pandemics, etc. Don't get me wrong, I've met some preppers IRL that are kind of delusional, but even they aren't "doomsday" preppers. I don't think I've ever knowingly met a "doomsday" prepper.
Unfortunately, I do think that the media's mockery of prepping did nothing to encourage people to prepare in a practical way, and if anything it discouraged people who have a distaste for things they believe are right-wing.
In my opinion, prepping needs to be rebranded. We should probably drop the term "prepping" all together and just call it something like "civil preparedness". A little promotion from FEMA would help, too, especially if done under Biden, since FEMA has pretty much abandoned any meaningful public communication about preparing people for emergencies. FEMA, and formerly the US DoD as well as Office of Civil Defense, used to publish more literature on emergency preparedness and response, but you'll notice that after the late 1980s those efforts significantly declined.
In any case, the title of the article implies that lots of preppers are "crazy folk" and provides what seems like an alternative that is not crazy. The reality is that this article describes exactly what at least 95% of preppers do. Well, besides the zombie apocalypse part.
I find that folks are in denial. They don't want to think of being on their own, with civil society in disorder. They feel (understandably) helpless in such a situation. So they cling to the idea that it "won't happen here" and anyone preparing for it is foolish.
We'd have to get over that mental hill, before folks can come out on the other side and start sensibly preparing.
I've thought a civil preparedness plan could be building-by-building for instance. Multi-family dwellings could have a set of shared resources. Makes it more palatable, when 'everyone is doing it'.
I agree. Some would call my family preppers, but we live in an area likely to be devastated by a major earthquake. We wanted at least 2 weeks of supplies, water, etc in case of it. We actually were closer to a month. People thought we were strange, until toilet paper and meat shortages at our local stores this year. I have had a few friends ask me for advice on stocking up now.
We started back when we lived in the Midwest. We had a basic "tornado kit" in the basement (our first year, there were a bunch of tornadoes within 5 miles of our home) and then later, a blizzard knocked out power. Of course, the power company does the big city first, then works their way out to the country. Took us 3 days to get power back. We had propane, but the furnace needs electricity to start up the fan. The Well needs power to run the pump, etc. I was very eye opening to us.
I will disagree with the idea that doomsday preppers are an extreme minority and with the idea that they are an invention of media. Doomsday prepping is pushed by several large religious organizations such as LDS, JW, and SDA to name a few. Between just these three organizations there are ~10M US citizens whose beliefs align with a doomsday scenario, and a large percentage of these people prep at the insistence and recommendation of their church.
Doomsday prepping as a phrase is an oxymoron. If there is a Doomsday, whatever that is, toilet paper is going to be the least of your concerns, almost by definition. Maybe Darnsday prepping. Or just simple due diligence, or keeping a well-stocked pantry as your ancestors did for centuries.
It could also be called preparedness. We got a brochure last year about being prepared as a society and little things you could keep in mind.
I don't mind having a wind up radio/usb-battery/torch in my cupboard. Or even some jugs of water, water cleansing tablets, first aid and stuff like that. Costs barely anything to be a little bit prepared.
Its all about how long you can last. A radio, some water, some batteries can last a couple of days. Anything longer requires a bigger investment. You have to decide what you're planning for.
In Scouts we teach about a bug-out bag (for being self-sufficient in a civil event like a flood or fire). Then there's home preparedness with canned food and first aid.
I quite enjoyed the beginnings of this essay & the parts of assessing risk and mapping out problem spaces. But the essay seems to take a weird turn about halfway through ("3: The Prepared Lifesylte") where the author begins to give their opinion on how folks should best live their lives _in general_, under the guise of suggesting that it's a "Prepared Lifestyle".
For example:
- 3.3. Learn new skills --> supposedly this is to counteract the risk of your job market shifting ("develop useful and marketable secondary skills"), but the example list is pretty random and not necessarily all that economically pragmatic. So it just seems more like the author believes people should have hobbies...
- 3.4.5. Don't Hurt Yourself: Just in Case, Keep your Senses Razor Sharp --> Which basically says, don't drink or do drugs because that raises the possibility that you'll get hurt? I mean, absolutely it'll be crappy if an earthquake happens while you're high & sure if you're piss drunk you might do something dumb to harm yourself but if you really wanna talk about avoiding injuries... taking recreational drugs is probably like on the bottom of the list of things to worry about for anyone who doesn't have substance abuse problems. Feels a lot more like the author just being prescriptive about lifestyle choices.
- 3.6. Get in Shape ---> The author proceeds to dedicate 4/5 of this section to how (in their opinion) someone should change their diet to lose weight. There is then 2 sentences on how "being able to walk or bike for several hours is likely good enough to deal with all practical scenarios we talked about thus far". If that was really what mattered, one could recommend an actual exercise routine and probably spend less time lecturing folks on their theoretical obesity. Physical fitness is correlated with weight, but they're often unrelated. After all, plenty of regular (non-obese) people can't bike for hours at a time (myself included! I have terrible hip problems from a desk job, even though I can do plenty of pullups & work out regularly). If you want to be able to run long distances, you have to run. Same for biking. To focus on weight seems disingenuous.
...and so on and so forth.
I do wish that the author wouldn't couch their personal opinions on how others should live under the guise of disaster planning. But the rest of the article is fantastic & very well thought out.
It depends on the career. Blue collar union workers (up until just recently) could easily go a lifetime without losing a job in certain parts of the country. But the flip side of it is the more job security you have today, the worse off you’ll be if you are ever out of a job (again like blue collar workers today).
Living in a hurricane zone makes prepping a once a year event if you’re just a bit smart, we stock water, canned food, snacks, dry groceries (pasta, beans) alternate cooking fuel (propane), batteries, a few gas cans, rope, tarp. Not hard to do, just rotate the food once the season is over, the rest can last forever. The idea is not to survive a zombie apocalypse but just a few weeks without power or a light flood.
I paid accident claims for five years. The vast majority of claims were either people working the system and finding ways to get their regular chiropractic treatments covered as accidents or "an accident waiting to happen."
In some cases, the "accidents waiting to happen" were egregious enough that the policy didn't pay anything. Accident policies always have a list of provisos that boil down to "Were you doing something egregiously stupidly dangerous for funsies when you got injured? We aren't cutting you a check!"
It was only a really tiny percentage of claims that were clearly and obviously "Damn. Wrong place, wrong time. It sucks to be you, dude." In five years, there were only about three claims that made it hard for me to sleep nights, even though I routinely read police reports and ER reports describing quite serious injuries (plus lots of really minor injuries -- see above about getting regular visits covered as "accidents").
I tend to not like articles of this sort. I don't like reading, for example, about millionaires and billionaires who have bunkers in New Zealand and a jet waiting "just in case" things go to hell over night.
All that does is it tells me the rich people running the world aren't doing enough to run the world well. They foolishly imagine that after they run the world into the ground they can handily escape the consequences of their actions and only the little people will really suffer because of it.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was published in 1895. The crux of the plot is that "in the dystopian future, the descendants of hard working servants will be eating the sheeple descendants of the helpless rich." (a message that tends to get lost in movie versions of the story).
That's a much more likely scenario if things truly go to hell. The rich people whose wealth and comforts depend upon stocks and bonds and working financial markets and the like will not likely come out on top.
It will be soldiers and hunters and people with real survival skills pertinent to the dystopian scenario who will suddenly be the people with power and social backing. Rich people skills only work to keep you on top if you keep your civilized world humming along nicely and don't let it go to hell in a hand basket.
Kind of like the scene in The Titanic where the rich guy tries to bribe his way onto a lifeboat and gets told "Your money isn't worth anything to me at the bottom of the sea." The guy he was trying to bribe was going to go down with the ship. He had no further use for money. He would be dead within a few short hours, tops, and he knew it.
I know why these articles appeal to people, but I wish they had less appeal. I wish actually resolving our problems was a more popular topic, but any time I try to talk about real solutions I'm given a ration of crap.
No one wants to hear that we should be doing x, y and z practical, unexciting thing today. It isn't any fun to talk about that. Most people just want to imagine some fantasy in which things get really and truly crazy bad -- as if they aren't bad enough currently -- but bad in a way where heroics somehow save the day rather than, say, washing your hands and not rudely blowing your nose next to people under your mask while standing in a crowded Walmart.
Articles like this are mostly escapist fantasy where people imagine themselves the hero in some future that plays out like an exciting movie. It helps them forget the dull reality of our current serious problems for a bit while not requiring them to actually fix anything in earnest.
In my worthless opinion it's not worth spending all my free time making sure I am prepared for a major disaster. If society really does collapse and I'm the only prepared person in a mile radius, with all the gear listed in that article, someone bigger and tougher is going to come take it off me pretty quickly.
Prepping beyond basic bugout-bag and having some extra food is pretty worthless if you are alone. Once you have a real community doing it to some degree it's absolutely worth it. City folks have very limited possibilities in any case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15110850