History channel shows and the like give preppers a bad name, but prepping, as highlighted in this article, doesn't need to involve guns and bunkers. In fact, your own government probably wants you to be prepping (at least the US does):
If you find yourself worrying about things like earthquakes and fires, there's an extra benefit to prepping: you can rest easy knowing you've done what you can.
If you live in (most parts of) California, you should be prepared for an earthquake, including a few days without water, at minimum. Wildfires and power outages are another risk that it is absolutely rational to prepare for, in many locations.
When we moved into our house, we put together a little box of canned good, a sterno stove, small medical kit, etc. We rediscovered it this year, and I ended up eating a bunch of 3-year-expired canned goods :D
(We did re-stock it. Never having to use it is a good thing.)
We buy an extra couple weeks worth of dry goods of things we are already using/eating, then cycle through it. Doesn't work for everything, but in the event of a disaster I'd be happy to have it :)
That’s the right way to do it, stock up on high quality canned and dry foods that you enjoy and then just cycle through the supply. One day you don’t feel like a fancy dinner so you crack open a few cans of chili and some nice mixed veggies, or boil up some noodles or whatever and just replace them every other month or so. Power goes out and you’re still living large instead of eating five year old MREs.
I’ve never prepped so asking out of sheer curiosity.
I wonder if there’s value in simulating disaster-living. It’s one thing to be ready with supplies and another to actually live through it, albeit for lesser time. Would it help discover a few more unknowns? Maybe some supply that you would only realize you need when you experience it?
Think of it a life-version of chaos monkey or similar to a fire drill?
A weekend is a pretty decent test though. If you flip the main breaker on your panel and use the water service shut off valve, you'll know in 24 hours how well you can cope. After 48, you'll know exactly what needs to be addressed. Provided you're in a house with access to those kinds of shut-offs
A simple way to do this is to just shut off the main breaker in your fuse box, instant power outage. Leave it off for whatever amount of time you want to practice for. Same thing goes for the main water shut off. You could leave those two off all weekend and quickly find out what you need. Another good and simple practice run is if you normally drive to get to a local store to plan and execute a route for walking there and back. Vice versa for if you normally walk everywhere, figure out what it would take to drive to a more remote location. Planning and knowing the ground truth of alternate routes is very important in a disaster scenario. For food preparedness you can do something I call the Bean Day exercise, simply don't go to the grocery store for an extended period of time and eat only what you have in your fridge, freezer and pantry. You'll have to get creative to reach the end, you'll realize how quickly you work your way through your stock, and you might discover a whole new set of go-to foods and dishes.
Huge value. We rented a small farm cottage for a year and the power there was unreliable, the water supply ran out regularly, and the road flooded a couple of times a year. It really helped us develop core preparedness habits out of learned experience.
Even recently we had a power cut at our place and discovered storing our power-out gear in the garage wasn't very useful with an electric main door and a blocked off side door. If it had been an extended outage I would have needed to break windows to get essential gear.
In my experience you'll find more isolated communities take preparedness more seriously because they experience grid frailty regularly and so build backup options into their daily lives. The least prepared live in denser urban areas where issues are far less likely. Problem is that when they do occur, and on a long enough timescale it's inevitable, general preparedness is low and so the shock and risk is greatly increased.
A simpler solution is to stock your shelves from back to front so the oldest items are always the first you grab. Don't buy things that you don't eat on a regular basis because:
a) they'll sit in the back of the pantry and expire
b) if you do have to eat them you'll be miserable if you don't like them
c) you won't know how to properly prepare them and you'll probably be missing some other key ingredients
And a non-simple solution is to write an iPhone app that scans QR codes that you print onto stickers that put on all your food so you can keep track of the expiration/purchase dates...
I know because that's the route I took haha. I won't pretend it was the BEST use of my time but it was fun and I can easily see how much I have of everything and where in my house it's located.
Also check if your city has a CERT (or in SF, NERT) organization! It's a citizen-trained response team initiative that usually falls under law enforcement. The idea is in an earthquake you can have a couple thousand purpose-trained citizens running around shutting off gas valves, checking on neighbors, assisting emergency services with communication (through HAM radio for example), and doing other basic tasks that let the fire department focus on cutting people out of collapsed buildings or putting out fires.
By the way, regarding "gun and bunker" preppers, this is a sharp divide in the prepper community. Practically every thread in /r/preppers and similar forums and subreddits eventually devolves into what essentially amounts to an ideological battle between communists and libertarians, or, "we believe people are inherently good" vs "we believe people are inherently evil" to take a non-political-compass take. FWIW, the "inherently good" people have more evidence on their side, based on how communities have responded to disaster in the pass. A great book on the subject is "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit[1]. She takes a look at primary sources from a set of disasters throughout history, and how people helped eachother with no expectation of reward. She also turns up some cases of totally selfless ultimate sacrifices for strangers. It's really interesting.
EDIT: A great fictional illustration of this rift in the prepper community is 'The Masque of the Red Death', a short story in the book "Radicalized" by Cory Doctorow. It follows the story of the ultimate prepper fantasy, a rich options trader who builds a "Fort Doom" in scrubland, equipped with a year or so of food, water, purification equipment, sanitation equipment, and of course a veritable armory. It compares this character against the general community of IIRC Portland, who are reacting to a government-ending pandemic through mutual aide instead. A really fun exploratory take.
Years ago, I lived outside a metro area deep in the woods, and the metro response team told us we would be low-priority in the event of a natural disaster. Makes sense: why burn resources to help a few thousand people when a few hundred thousand are suffering. The metro response team told us to prepare for 30 days without support, especially electricity (we were ALL on well water) or accessible roads.
We formed a dozen smaller neighborhood teams that met regularly to identify elderly people who would need check-ins, medical needs, resources people were willing to share. This was in addition to family prep: water, first aid, food, batteries, etc. We even did an emergency rations taste-off (they all suck, btw) and bought a community cargo container that we filled with community supplies (I had left the hood by that point).
It was surprising that about 10% of the people in each area refused to participate. Most were pissed that we even had their names on a spreadsheet, even though they were older and might need assistance. They felt we were intruding on their privacy and they didn't need our help. However, we included them in the calculations for emergency resources in case they decided to come around after a disaster happened.
TL;DR: city recommended rural folks be prepared for a max 30 days on your own.
Living in Florida, I've gone weeks without power. It's so disappointing to get up, go to work, come back, and still not have power. And it's 90 degrees and 100% humid, and if you open the windows bugs will get in. It's just up to you and whatever neighbors are nearby to clean things up so the utility crews can try to rebuild.
One hurricane knocked the cable out for months and I got so desperate that I signed up for AOL...
The "prepping" in the article isn't "being prepared", which is what ready.gov suggests, it's dumping massive resources into paranoid fantasies of surviving alone for a few months.
What are the odds of an earthquake or hurricane temporarily decimating local infrastructure? Can you name any times that's happened in recent memory? I have to reach as far back into the ancient annals as... 2017.
I live in Northern California for the past 25 years (that's a quarter of a century). In that entire time, I have not seen a single earthquake that required me to be prepared for (I still do have an emergency kit and we're all prepared). In fact earthquakes of similar sizes happen all over the US.
Instead, the following things have far more direct impact on me and my family: driving in traffic, walking on the street, electronics fires in my garage, the food I eat, the amount of exercise I get. I'm sure there will be a Big One at some point in the next 30 years, but in terms of risk, the basic prepping procedures handle a wider range of common problems than earthquakes.
Lives are ~75 years long, should I actually invest any effort into large-scale problems that occur at scales longer than my life when there are risks that are far higher around which I can make direct changes?
Depends on how much effort it takes. Statistically, my house will never burn down within my lifetime, but the $20 it takes to buy a fire extinguisher is worth it. It also doesn't take much effort to do the types of things mentioned on https://www.ready.gov/kit
Likewise, I have all-electic heating and no gas service to my home, but a carbon monoxide detector only costs a few dollars so I still have one even though the risk is very low (most fires would probably trip the smoke detectors first I think.)
If it happens during your lifetime, it will likely only be once. So 'it never happened to me before' is not a very good way to reason about this sort of risk.
Please recall that when the last "big one" happened in the Bay Area, the outcome was very few deaths (63 people died), but decades of economic problems. 500 people die in car accidents in the bay area every year. It would seem that fatalities from earthquakes aren't a good model for making rational decisions about what is likely to affect you in your lifetime.
We also have a much better understanding of geological phenomenon and money likely gets you a faster evac than a gun and some gold bars. But again, pointless argument on my part since everything boils down to the point I made below.
I too live in NorCal and am appalled by the glib headline on this NG article. We are encouraged to have emergency supplies ready in the event of catastrophe, the whole 'preppers are idiots' but a few aren't is really unhelpful and short sighted. I'm not a prepper and my emergency kit isn't in good shape but it should be...
Not the best example since there was a severe earthquake in Pompeii in 62 AD. They were still rebuilding in 79 AD when the town was destroyed by Vesuvius.
If they had taken the matter seriously, they'd not have rebuilt there. We know some Romans recognized the mountain as a volcano years before the eruption, but if there were any warnings associated with this recognition, they seem to have gone unheeded.
(Also, earth quakes are/were pretty common throughout Italy. This perhaps contributed to complacency.)
Prepping is just insurance. I buy life insurance so my family is taken care of in the unlikely event that I die. I have some stored food, water, etc. in the unlikely event that there's a temporary disruption in my ability to get those things.
Insurance is you betting you will die and the insurance company betting you will not die. In order for the insurance company to make money, they have to be right more than you.
For a software developer, 2 weeks worth of food isn't too bad on a budget, but could literally be a life saver in some situations, or even just soften the blow if I lost a job.
I do agree about your risk assessment. For water, those who have water heaters (rather than tankless systems) have a ready supply of drinkable water. Assuming that it isn't damaged/inaccessible after the earthquake. But, it is also possible a separate storage of water could be inaccessible after an earthquake.
We had a twenty year old water heater that finally called it quits this past spring. My wife and I discussed paying the extra cost to "upgrade" to a tankless water heater. In the end our frugal nature won and we put in another cheaper tank heater.
Then in August we were hit by a Derecho (an inland hurricane). The entire city was without power for more than 10 days (some much longer) and temperatures in the upper nineties. The one saving grace was I still had a working water heater since it's gas powered.
> should I actually invest any effort into large-scale problems that occur at scales longer than my life when there are risks that are far higher around which I can make direct changes?
Yes.
The relevant number is not p, the likelihood of the event.
It is something like:
EV = p * consequences
If the consequences are high enough (eg, death), then it is still rational to prepare for low probability events. Especially when the prep cost is low.
... and what we've established is that not a lot of people die in big earthquakes, but there's a lot of economic impact. I think people overweight the consequences because earthquakes are big and exciting.
I suppose that's fair. But I think it's less the "big and exciting" part and more the "imagining myself trapped and dying of thirst" or some such that motivates the "consequences" part of the equation.
Where in northern California? If you're not near the coast, you probably will never experience an earthquake. As the recent quake in Massachusetts shows, however, earthquakes can happen almost anywhere.
Also, fun fact, the chances of a 'Cascadia megaquake', or a full rip of the Cascadia subduction zone, is about 1 in 6 over the next 50 years. That will produce a 9.0 extending from the Mendocino triple junction off the coast of Cape Mendocino, CA to Canada. It's the same type of earthquake that destroyed Fukushima. You'll have to be pretty far inland to avoid the shaking from that.
I find many times that scientists report ominious sounding things like this, but the underlying data doesn't support it. I think they're just prone to hyperbole and overselling their results because it's what brings in funding.
You should look into the supporting data before making comments like this. The evidence for the timeline of past Cascadia zone megaquakes is actually quite solid. We can even corroborate the records from North American samples with samples from Japan when the resulting tsunamis caused damage there.
...that has the full-fault events at ~500 year intervals, and the partial-fault events at ~240 year intervals. Last full fault event was January 26th, 1700.
There's very little wrong with prepping guns. The details are sensitive and debatable, but a "well-regulated Militia" is in the Constitution. The fear of guns that "responsible people" increasingly have means that irresponsible people are becoming a larger share of gun owners. A "prep" that has guns and separately locked ammo in a locked safe is a responsible prep.
With the upcoming administration, the likelihood of a ban on magazines holding more than 10 rounds is a possibility. Both Joe and Kamala want gun registration, which is a no-no. The government has no business knowing who owns what. They work for us, not the other way around. And no, I'm not a right-wing gun nut. Quite the opposite, actually. I dislike the current administration. Our rights are inalienable, not granted by government. The second something is granted, it's no longer a right, but a granted privilege. I don't do granted privileges. Needless to say, no one I know who is a gun owner plans on registering anything. Most of the people I know who are gun owners bought them in face-to-face buys and there is zero record of them owning anything, as it should be. I dislike both the Dems and the Reps as far as rights go. I'd be happier with a tiny government that exists to protect the borders, ensure free trade, and prevent monopoly. The Founders were correct.
You haven't met many Finns, have you? Or Czechs. I know many Europeans who would love to have a 2nd Amendment. I've lived in Europe before, so I've had time to actually speak and interact with locals in several EU countries. I met heaps of Germans with all manner of firearms. It doesn't come up much in conversation in the EU, but the sentiment is alive and well and with more people than you might think.
And to a man, they loathe the need. However, you would be shocked at the number of "unregistered" firearms in Germany and all over Europe. Guns from the war, guns from abroad, all make their way into Europe.
NY State mandated the registration of all AR and AK rifles a couple of years back. State police in NY show that less than 100 people have bothered to do so. Those people know better. Registration can lead to confiscation. Janet Reno, the erstwhile AG, actually said that the purpose of registration is eventual confiscation. No, thank you.
I don't need to register the vehicle if I don't drive it on public property. I don't need to submit my information to the government to buy the vehicle. And I don't need a drivers license on private property either.
Fair enough. So should gun registration be required for it to be carried in public then? So you can buy and keep guns on your private property, but to "operate" it in public you're required to register it. And here in the context of a firearm, operate is carry, not necessarily discharge.
* I don't see how that wouldn't solve any problem with actual gun crime. Cars are required to be registered since they are meaningfully "operated" in public peacefully, guns aren't. For cars this is different because you can see the license plate, whether or not the registration is current, everybody has one... Nobody that wants to remain in good legal standing would drive an unregistered (unlicensed, uninsured...) car on a public road. Outside of concealed carry and a couple political protests, nobody is carrying guns around in public except criminals. Non-criminals shoot their guns on private property like ranges, and transport them in their vehicles on public roads. The latter has never been a problem. And lastly, criminals aren't going to follow silly restrictions like "get your gun registered before you carry it in public to go murder somebody."
* People are paranoid (probably rightfully so) about a gun registration database. This would not only confirm their fears, it wouldn't be useful for combatting crime making the paranoia worse.
If you take a look at CA's gun laws, almost all of them are laughably stupid to the point that they restrict cosmetic features, and where they don't, they don't meaningfully stop somebody from committing a violent offense with a gun. If you understand how guns work you understand this simply: the gun laws in places like CA are meant to stifle gun culture not prevent crime (since they are laughably ineffective) or they are written by people who are very, very, ignorant of how guns actually work. In the latter case, it has the former effect.
One of the government's fundamental purposes is to protect and maintain your enshrined rights.
For example the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In other words, an inalienable right which is taken away from anyone who is shot and killed or disabled by another person.
There's a very strong argument that the right to life trumps the right to kill.
The USA is a legendary place for amount of gun crime. Probably if you didn't keep shooting each other so much, nobody would care about registering the guns, and you'd be happy.
But collectively you do shoot each other rather a lot. Strikingly more than a lot of other countries.
As a father of small kids, the danger of owning a gun are manifold: kids finding guns and playing with them; burglars who use your guns against you; “accidents” due to mishandling; the risk of marital arguments becoming fatal... the dangers can outweigh benefits.
As a former soldier I respect firearms enough not to buy them unless I can safeguard them. And many people can’t or won’t.
The first two problems would be easily prevented by keeping your firearms in a safe. If you're worried about arguments with your spouse becoming fatal, please talk to a counselor ASAP.
As for negligent discharges, which are probably the most legitimate concern, you should always follow the four rules of gun safety:
1. Treat all guns as if they are always loaded.
2. Never let the muzzle point at anything that you are not willing to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target and you have made the decision to shoot.
4. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
In my experience, these are hammered into civilian students who take firearm training classes, but soldiers in the military often haven't heard of the four rules and generally are far more casual with their guns than civilians.
It's easy to dismiss the concerns out of hand and spout basic handling rules that soldiers do get, btw and are drilled into them.
The wisdom is realizing that all of this goes out the window when the shit hits the fan. Also unless you're training your entire family on weapon use, they will be untrained folks around dangerous weapons.
There is a reason barracks do not allow weapons and all that stuff is under guard in a proper armory.
Your flippant response sounds more like a religious defense than practical consideration of real situations. There's a reason a large number of firearm deaths are one of the above categories I listed.
You do not need to teach young children how to use a gun if you instead teach them to never, under any circumstances, to touch the gun. This is not hard to do, though many irresponsible people neglect to do so. And none of this goes out the window even in fantasy "shit hits the fan" scenarios; the rules for how to handle (or, to not handle) guns remain the same. The rules keep you safe when you follow them dogmatically. As soon as you start making 'common sense' exceptions to the rules, that is when you put yourself in danger. A lot of people have gotten hurt after thinking "I know I shouldn't point the gun at myself, but I KNOW I just unloaded it so logically there is no danger..."
(And anecdotally, I've personally witnessed no correlation whatsoever between military service and taking gun safety seriously.
YMMV.)
If abstinence education was effective, there would be few unwanted children in red states.
A shit hits the fan scenario is when you're black out drunk or something where you're in a bad mental state, not society collapsing. Following rules does not help in a situation where you're unable to follow rules
If 'gun abstention' weren't effective, there would be a whole lot more kids with gunshot wounds in red states. The fact of the matter is that telling kids not to touch guns generally does work.
I don't doubt that you've considered your experience and knowledge in coming to the decision to not own a gun. My response wasn't flippant, and I'm sorry it came across that way.
I grew up around (unlocked) guns and knew better than to even think about touching one of them while I was a child. I am aware that many children aren't taught proper respect for firearms, which is part of why I recommended keeping them locked up. (The guns, not the children...)
My comment about soldiers is based on my personal interactions with them. I know they go through gun safety handling, but in practice they frequently have very poor muzzle discipline ("But it's unloaded!": I don't care). I've also talked to a few soldiers who had never heard of the four rules of gun safety, either by name or after hearing them listed out, so I don't think all soldiers have had gun safety drilled into them as strongly as you may have.
I don't live in barracks, but my understanding of military life as a whole is that the military has to support the lowest common denominator in their troops. If you have children, you probably aren't a hotheaded 20 year old anymore, and it seems like that should factor into your decision making process, no?
The other two points (being shot by a spouse or burglar using your own gun), frankly sound silly to me. You listed four categories, but only two of them are responsible for a large number of firearm deaths. It's extremely rare for a burglar to take and use a victim's gun against the victim, and also pretty rare for a spouse to murder the other.
And just to reiterate what I said in my first post, if you're even a little worried you might lose control and kill your spouse, or your spouse might kill you, you need to see a counselor right now regardless of whether you have guns or not. (Alternatively, if you do get along with your spouse, then I'm not sure why you factored that into your decision to not own a gun?)
I am making this post in good faith, and I hope you'll respond.
For me the danger of all these externalities outweighs the potential gains.
The biggest danger of all is the perception that you are somehow in control of things that you can mitigate but do not actually control.
While you may be correct that spousal conflicts are not the biggest cause of deaths, a quick search showed that suicide is 5x more likely if that suicidal person has access to a gun.
Whether you get along with your spouse today is not guaranteed tomorrow. Counseling? Yes it helps. Guns? Statistically not.
Empirically, gun accidents are very rare. They are scary, but it's often the less-scary stuff that gets you.
Obviously you should be careful, and of you're not, I'm sure the odds are a lot worse. But empirically, it seems most people handle guns somewhat safely. Perhaps because they are scary.
That being said, if you don't feel comfortable being safe with a gun, don't get one. Or maybe you just don't want one more thing to worry about.
People stockpiling guns at home for the unlikely event that they will need to use them to defend their lives/property qualifies for a "well-regulated Militia"? That's news to me.
There is disaster preparedness and then there is prepping, the two don't match each other. Most self-proclaimed preppers advocate atrocious "us or them" social darwinist ideologies and have policies that could get them and others killed. For example, many of them think it's a good idea to go camping in the woods in case of a natural disaster, which almost never makes any sense. They also frequently talk about shooting strangers instead of helping them and stockpile ammunition instead of antibiotics. They also should worry more about dental care and less about other people.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but as rule of thumb I'd stay away from any US prepper as far as I could in case of a genuine emergency like a Yellowstone outbreak or a worldwide pandemic.
I've studied the US "prepper" culture intensively for a novel I've written, watched hundreds of videos by preppers for research and read Lundin, Dartnell, and Seymour's books among others. It's not a prejudice, it's my verdict.
Oh yes, I agree. The reason is also that in the US part of the right-wing pro gun / militia / anti-federal government culture on the countryside overlaps with the prepper community. Some of them are also fanatic Christians who literally believe a day of judgment will come soon. There are some survivalists and naturalists among them (like Lundin), but they are in a minority.
Maybe that was called prepping back the day. Nowadays, prepping was pretty much taken over by guns and bunker types. Which is bad, because general readiness is a good thing. German authorities certainly recommend a very level of stuff like food and medicine to be kept at home.
Prepper culture definitely still includes the amassing of food and water storage, as well as paraphernalia like CB radios. It’s just that there are perhaps some loud believers in the need for ammo thrown in there, and why not?
One consideration is old ammo is somewhere between useless and dangerous. You might get 10 years from date of purchase out of it, but large ammo stockpiles are of limited use in a collapse of society situation and need to be constantly updated.
Long term bow, atal, and sling are much better for hunting.
Whoever told you this was probably trying to sell more ammunition; modern ammunition is good for decades at least. In the present, use of old ammunition (a few decades or more) is discouraged because the old formulations of primer compound produce corrosive hygroscopic metal salts that will rust your gun badly if you're not dilligent with cleaning. Very cheap old surplus ammunition from overseas is something to be wary of, but that's mostly because of bad QC that made that ammunition unreliable or dangerous from the day it was made.
As for atal or sling, unless you've been practicing with these since you were a child, I think you'll sooner starve to death than score yourself a single meal. The cultures which used those tools had people practicing with them for years before they were useful with them. A sling is easy to make, I encourage you to try it out. I used a pair of shoelaces I bought at the grocery store for $2. It is not easy to even get the projectile flying in the general direction you intended, so if you try this make sure you're far from any buildings or bystanders...
(But really, I recommend buying some canned food. It is unlikely any infrastructure collapse would last more than a few weeks. Any scenario where you have to hunt for food at all, let alone for years, seems exceedingly unlikely.)
I doubt that people are stockpiling ammo for a short term disruption. The point at which tens of thousands of rounds becomes useful isn’t a few weeks disruption in food distribution.
To justify my stance, in a long term survival situation slings are for low risk low reward hunting. With even moderate practice they become very high calories per resources and time invested while your doing something else. Aka, if you’re collecting firewood and see a squirrel, vs specifically looking for squirrels. That’s still true if you’re missing 95% of the time.
Plenty of active bow hunters are around to tell you how long that takes to learn. Unfortunately, manufacturing arrows and replacement bows takes significant effort. Atal are generally worse than bows, but vastly easier to manufacture and maintain.
As to ammo it’s very much possible to find good ammo that’s 50 years old. Depending on specific ammo to still be good in 50 years is a very different thing when you can’t depend on climate control. That’s not a concern at 70+ but a 25 year old presumably has a longer time horizon.
People stockpiling guns may have fantasies about a thousand years of anarchy after an apocalyptic 'SHTF', but their belief that this is likely doesn't actually make it likely.
I completely agree. However, the accuracy of their predictions is independent of how their preparing for that risk. It’s often said to prepare food and water etc for short term disruptions, but having sufficient water is vastly more important than having sufficient food.
This is not true. 50 year old ammo will shoot indistinguishably from new ammo if both have been stored correctly. Prolonged exposure to water or high humidity can damage cartridges by preventing the powder from burning, but that doesn't make it more dangerous, only useless (at worst).
As for humidity, I think you would be surprised. Much of Appalachia and the East Coast have high humidity levels (typically 70-90% during summer IIRC) and I've never found ammo damaged by humidity there. I've shot 25 year old ammo that was put in an ammo can and dumped in a hiding spot near a pond (so, very high humidity) and had no issues shooting with it. Even if the ammo is stored in the manufacturer's cardboard box, I wouldn't worry about humidity damage unless average levels are over 85 or 90%. Water damage is a different matter, but I don't have any experience with that.
That video is on Sporting Ammunition which is relatively low energy and shotgun shells which are reasonably safe in a fire. A rifle round cooking off is significantly more dangerous though without a barrel it’s below a normal handgun round, still the difference from that video is still shocking.
Edit: It's mostly true that ammo in a fire will just pop and maybe just throw a little brass a short distance.
BUT from that fire I'm witness to the fact that ammo can also "fire" with enough force to go through steel 50 cal ammo boxes and continue through such things as walls and cans.
There were bullet holes through the shop's paneled and insulated tin walls.https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/ammo-in-a-fire...
I will admit I may be overstating the humidity issues, my personal experience was 15 year old ammo in Florida shed which had issues but clearly YMMV.
Do you have a source for that? I don't really understand why shotgun rounds would be less dangerous, particularly if rifle rounds are more dangerous. More powder = more dangerous would make sense to me, but that doesn't sound like what you're saying.
Some parts of Florida are more humid than Appalachia, so maybe the difference between 75% and 95% humidity has a greater effect than 55% to 75%.
I was told the rifle rounds where more dangerous, but not why. My suspicion is the plastic tube around a shotgun shell loses strength before the round is hot enough to go off ~200C. Though it’s probably more complicated.
As to humidity, I don’t know it might be just extreme humidity or it could be humidity + temperature, or perhaps we had a bad case of ammo to start with.
Boy would I love to get ahold of some handheld radios designed for 'prepper' use.
1. use cognitive radio techniques to find and frequency-hop to whitespace radio frequencies that are conducive to best propagation over the 0-10 mile range on unlicensed radio bands
2. use ad hoc mesh networking to support sending datagrams like text messages (preferably E2EE via say Signal Protocol) or GPS coordinates up to, say, 7 hops away
3. support a 'emergency mode' where the radio power limits are relaxed and the frequencies for use by point A are relaxed to cover any radio band not actively reserved by law enforcement / military / first responders. In theory the cognitive radio techniques of frequency hopping and waiting to transmit until confirming radio dead air would prevent radio interference with whatever commercial TF / broadcast radio / CB radio / MURS/FRS/Business band radio signal, but to keep the FCC and HAMs hearts from stopping, things like the military bands could be blocked off just to provide that last 0.00001% guarantee of safety against interference.
All of the 3 _seem_ possible to productize using SBCs and SDRs, but I don't know where to start, I think I gotta finish my 8-bit breadboard computer YT series by Ben Eater before I even tried to tinker with this.
A friend of mine is building a physical product based on the ESP32 platform that is exactly along those lines. I would be happy to put you in touch with him if it interests you, just email me pc.peterso AT (capital G’s mail service).com
What does it mean for prepping to be 'taken over'? Preparing yourself is an activity an individual performs, it's not some sort of club that could be taken over. Some loon deciding to waste his money buying 50 rifles shouldn't be a factor for you deciding to put a flashlight in the nightstand beside your bed, or having a few gallons of fresh water stashed away in a closet.
Actually it does need to involve guns, or else everything you’ve spent all that time prepping will be stolen from you in the event of a major catastrophe.
Take this with a grain of salt, as there’s no way to verify it’s real, but supposedly someone who lived through the Bosnian War posted about their experiences on a prepping forum, and the stories are pretty disturbing: https://prephole.com/surviving-a-year-of-shtf-in-90s-bosnia-...
"prepping" is a specific term for preparing for the collapse of society, it is not a generic term for preparation. Preparing for a natural disaster is not prepping.
Often during an acute natural disaster people help each other out and are more mutually supportive than normal. People usually find ways to get the basics up and running, such as shelter and food, pretty fast.
Relying on your neighbors to be prepared and able to help you out does seem to be a very popular way to 'prepare', but I don't think it's an approach to encourage...
But in practice natural disasters are rarely a "collapse of society" sort of thing. It's more that you should have supplies and shelter, and a way to communicate. In the middle of difficulties where people work together, I'd say that's "society" in action.
"Collapse of society" tends to be more descriptive of human-driven disasters such as war and civil war, where people start turning against each other and there's high levels of mutual distrust and violence.
Being prepared has nothing to do with it. Nobody was prepared for the Anchorage earthquake of 1964, but within minutes people had self-organized into firefighting and excavation teams, set up emergency response relays with a hodgepodge of walkie-talkies, police radio, and AM broadcasters, and within hours there was a centralized volunteer dispatch and food bank.
Relying on your neighbors in a disaster doesn't mean hiding out in their anti-zombie bunker. It means knowing that the entire community will respond together to overcome the emergency.
Being prepared doesn't have to mean being a loon hiding in a bunker. Elsewhere in this thread I have recommended having some canned food, water, and a flashlight. These are very easy ways to prepare for a wide variety of unlikely scenarios.
We all live in a society. If folks need help in an exceptional time and you do not help them, folks will remember that you spent the time locked in your bunker instead of helping the neighbor whose supplies were flooded. Someone is always going to be forced to rely on others: A wheelchair cannot easily go over downed limbs, for example, and the user won't necessarily be able to flee a fire without help.
Additionally, if you want folks to be prepared, they need both the means to prepare and the space to do it - which basically means having a robust safety net and/or minimum pay laws.
It's sort of a spectrum, though, isn't it? I mean, we had a sorta/kinda "collapse" in April for a few weeks. There were genuine shortages of some stuff.
And more topically: let's be honest, right now the US is on a crazy train heading straight for riots and a general strike come December 14th. Are nationwide giant protests against a stolen government a "collapse of society" too? A little, yeah.
Natural disasters and societal collapse are totally separate things.
They're similar, but similar in the same way a paper cut is to a life threatening laceration. It's a spectrum to be sure, but you need dramatically different strategies to deal with them.
If a snowstorm blocks the roads and takes out your power for a week, what is that if not a local collapse of society? Utilities, emergency responders, access to grocery stores... these are things we take for granted that can and have been temporarily disrupted by natural disasters.
"16,000 Canadian Forces personnel deployed, 12,000 in Quebec and 4,000 in Ontario at the height of the crisis."
Many people were left without electricity, heating and even food. Alarms were disabled, police couldn't reach some neighborhoods and there was a lot of crime. Law and order were put on hold, until the army got to us.
Law and order were put on hold, until the army got to us.
I'm Canadian, grew up in the area, was living in BC during the ice storm, and returned soon thereafter.
No one I know would describe it this way. I've never heard the ice storm described this way.
Yes, many people were without services for extended periods of time. Yes, the Army was required to clear roads, removed downed trees, and was in play to help calm the public.
Yet "Law and order" on hold, paints a picture I do not believe as accurate. I sounds as if hoodlums and criminals were running rampant in the streets. Can you find any news articles, any info collaborating this, or some variation?
Certainly, I know of many people with snowmobiles, which made trips to get supplies and so forth for neighbours. I also know stories of people sharing, helping their neighbours.
I've been without power for 2 weeks where I live, due to a massive windstorm, and living in a very rural location.
Where I grew up, in the mid/late 1970s, our entire county's substation blew up, when covered with one of the largest snowfalls of the century (snow was literally to the top of telephone poles, I recall my father having to climb out of a second story window, and dig a path so we could get out of the back door and start digging out...).
The storm was already big, but it was coupled with lake effect snow in my area. Needless to say, it took weeks to get power back, clear the roads of 10+ feet of snow, which fell over a few days.
In none of these cases, did everything break down. People just stuck together.
NOTE: I fully agree that eventually, things will break down. If people have no food, and there is no food available, people will ensure they have food.
But none of these events seem quite like this.
Even a city apartment often has more than a week of something to eat. Even if it's old lima beans. :P
I lost power for a few days during that ice storm. And a number of years later, another storm only knocked me out for about a day but there were people without power for 2-3 weeks. People stayed with relatives and friends, presumably there were emergency shelters, etc. But there was no armed gangs roaming the street in the Northeast and I doubt there were in Canada either.
I have to agree with Cory Doctorow: when shit hits the fan, it's solidarity what happens. "The fact that we remain here today, after so many disasters in our species’ history, is a reminder that we are a species of self-rescuing princesses—characters who save one another in crisis, rather than turning on ourselves"[0]. It certainly has been the case in my city of 20-something million, total collapse due to earthquake, overwhelming self organizing and mutual help. People will probably turn on the rich and powerful, though, and the narrative of law and order breakdown if no police/government is likely coming from them
In short, increases of crimes and then declines of crimes once the army is deployed.
> "Analyses indicate that there is a direct effect of increased public enforcement on the number of infractions reported in the affected areas."
> "The Montérégie region: [...] a relative increase of about 50%, while it is only 15% in Montreal."
> "For the Montreal region, we observe that the deployment of police forces has resulted in a significant decrease in property crime and crimes against persons. In addition, the deployment of military personnel has also led to a decrease in property crimes."
They explain the increases in criminality with: "In other words, while the door-to-door operation would reduce property crime, it would at the same time increase the visibility of certain offences such as burglary".
I am not certain if their conclusion is accurate. But whether or not, this explains the rumors of people breaking into people's homes/cabins during that initial period and how the presence of the army calmed people's fears.
Never was it gangs roaming in the street (knowing the organized crime scene of Montreal, getting caught looting by the leading criminal elements during such an emergency would result in sever punishment) but small criminals working in the shadow.
The article also agrees with one of your points: "The work of Quarantelli (1960; 2001) shows that one of the main characteristics of human behaviour in times of disaster is not to flee, but to stay and persist as long as possible in daily activities (preserving their environmental reference)."
And they had the tools to deal with it. I can't make a fire with my spare wood in my city apartment. A society where a large portion of the population dies is a societal collapse.
I think the number of people who actually perform prepping is vastly larger than the number of people consuming media trying to redefine the term, so that campaign will be an uphill climb.
"prepping" is a generic term for disaster preparations. I'm not sure why you think its appropriate to advocate for a narrow usage of the term, but none of my prepper friends would agree with you.
I think "prepping" can be generically any act of preparing ("I'm prepping for the new deployment," "I'm prepping for my trip to Mexico", "I'm prepping for the show tonight").
I have heard the term "prepper" used pretty much exclusively for people who prepare for societal collapse, though.
There may be a media push to constrain the meaning, but that has not been the common American English usage for the 20th Century at least. Prepping for an exam. Prepping a turkey. Common usage.
Odd that an attempt is made to distort the meaning of “prepping” in a forum called Hacker News. I remember about 20 years ago when there was an attempt by the media to limit the term “hacking” to unethical IT practices, instead of the whole range of creative ad-hoc system and product fixes. The community was annoyed...
If you're preparing for a natural disaster that prevents society from functioning normally for some time, then you're a prepper.
Prepping, means preparing for situations where you will no longer be able to rely on society to provide the services it normally does, regardless of the reasons.
Sweden wants you to prep, they sent a letter to every household in the country.
I prepped for Covid in late February or early March, I was pessimistic in my assumptions, but not by much.
Prepping is important, but you also have to be reasonable when you plan, and you have to be aware of what you can't adapt for (e.g I realized that I had to assume water would still be available, because I couldn't store 14+ days of water in my apartment).
Most of the people who are normally labeled preppers don't have a reasonable assumption of what they prep for. So they try to prepare for the end of the world, not because it is realistically going to happen, but because they need to control things.
People are expected to be able to manage on their own for at least 72 hours in case of systemic/societal disruptions. It's quite sane advice really, even though a lot of people actually seem opposed to the idea for some reason.
Yeah, I get that, and it is a pretty good of how disconnected people and authorities can be at times. If people aren't able to prepare for things they're expected to prepare for, then people's living conditions need to be improved until they can prepare.
There's going to be people who chose to live in such places despite recommendations, of course, but that's a matter of personal choice.
https://www.ready.gov/
If you find yourself worrying about things like earthquakes and fires, there's an extra benefit to prepping: you can rest easy knowing you've done what you can.
If you live in (most parts of) California, you should be prepared for an earthquake, including a few days without water, at minimum. Wildfires and power outages are another risk that it is absolutely rational to prepare for, in many locations.
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