The book Eternity by Greg Bear had an interesting take on this. In that book (spoiler) there is an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia, which devastates the surface of the Earth.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It’s a great book, in addition to this aspect (which is a somewhat minor part of it).
As someone who has never had to truly live through a disaster (knock on wood), I found this story to be compelling in thinking about disaster planning: <a href="http://www.theplacewithnoname.com/blogs/klessons/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.theplacewithnoname.com/blogs/klessons/index.html</a><p><i>>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><p>I think it delivers a lot more backstory on what happens when you <i>don't</i> prepare for something, which you don't get simply reading a how-to list.
This is a much more practical and realistic prepping guide than what a lot of self-labeled preppers tend to practice.<p>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.<p>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.
> Putting somewhere around 30-40% of your emergency stash into the stock market may be a good call.<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>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.
For me, planning for a five day power outage in the winter seems like it's something that takes only a limited amount of effort and resources and could come in very handy indeed. Make sure you have enough water (and a way to make it potable), heat, food, light, 1st aid and communications.<p>Going all in and getting a year of supplies seems excessive.<p>As always, YMMV :-)<p>PS: In Germany, the BMI (interior ministry) publishes a free guide for preparedness at <a href="https://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/themen/bevoelkerungsschutz/zivil-und-katastrophenschutz/selbstschutz-und-selbsthilfe/selbstschutz-und-selbsthilfe-node.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/themen/bevoelkerungsschutz/zivil-...</a>
They recommend a 10 day food and water supply.
Some decent guides from government:<p>* <a href="https://www.ready.gov" rel="nofollow">https://www.ready.gov</a><p>* <a href="https://www.getprepared.gc.ca/index-en.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.getprepared.gc.ca/index-en.aspx</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>Perhaps have a bag of necessities (clothes, toiletries) in case you have to evacuate your abode quickly.
One aspect that the article does not cover enough is the importance of training. Whether that's medical training, self-defense training, survival training or general preparedness training, training is what makes gear/supplies useful. Far too many people will purchase x, y, and z in order to be "prepared", but if you can't properly apply that tourniquet you bought a dozen of, then it is useless, and so are you in the event of an emergency.<p>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".
The thing is, you don't have to be a Doomsday Prepper to just be prepared. It's about mitigating the risk of the disasters you are <i>likely</i> to face in your locality.<p>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.<p>The biggest lessons I took from that were:<p>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."<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak</a>
If you want to learn how to do disaster planning as an organisation, a really good example to follow is Waffle House, who take it extremely seriously. <a href="https://disasterphilanthropy.org/blog/preparedness/disaster-preparedness-the-waffle-house-way/" rel="nofollow">https://disasterphilanthropy.org/blog/preparedness/disaster-...</a>
Of course, there is a non-trivial cost to spending time dealing with this stuff, particularly the less likely outcomes.<p>As with any risk assessment, one has to judge the probability of certain events and act accordingly.<p>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.<p>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.
I liked the book from lcamtuf "Silence on the Wire" , I used to read what this guy writes.
But then as i recall he started to work for google. Probably helped there with browser security and user tracking.<p>He wrote some good open source tools thou.
The author seems to be missing some important developments:<p><pre><code> Written by lcamtuf@coredump.cx, Dec 2015, minor updates Jul 2021.
</code></pre>
...<p><pre><code> 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.</code></pre>
> <i>In the US in the 90s, your lifetime likelihood of victimization was estimated to be around 80%; the odds of suffering criminal injury hovered at 40%.</i><p>Any source? These figures seem absurdly high, and I say that as a former resident of NYC in the 90s.
For the most intense emergency situations: If you take up wilderness camping (hiking, floating, snow travel based) you accrue the kinds of equipment that can carry you through most realistic emergency situations. But, more importantly, you learn to use and maintain that gear to keep you hydrated, fed and warm. Beyond that it's a matter of knowing where to collect water and having or finding enough calories.<p>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.
The most likely one is missing I think - full collapse of the financial systems globally.<p>Everything is interconnected and incredibly fragile and correlated.
I was thinking about this earlier. To me a high priority would be movement, be able to get out of the disaster zone and be able to move to safer locations.
"(...) putting the rest of their money in a rainy-day fund (...)"<p>What do we do when we are outcast from the financial system or it ceases to function?
First line, from 2015.<p>"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."<p>Well, that hasn't aged well...