The most likely one is missing I think - full collapse of the financial systems globally.
Everything is interconnected and incredibly fragile and correlated.
Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
111–120 of 140 posts
Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
#112Of course, there is a non-trivial cost to spending time dealing with this stuff, particularly the less likely outcomes. As with any risk assessment, one has to judge the probability of certain events and act accordingly. The thing that bugs me about this culture -- and I don't include the author of this piece, who sounds imminently rational and level-headed -- is that a lot of people in this space seem to want these…
You put that beautifully - it really is the case that "normal" preppers seem to be totally relishing becoming the next Mad Max hero, roaming the wilderness with their stash of weaponry... What's really great about this piece apart from the fact it isn't this ^ is that it is beautifully written...
I always wonder how many of those preppers have the actual skil, and yes gear, to roam the country side for long. Orientation, navigation, endurance, you name it. I'll take any long distance hiker for tjose scenarios than some wpuld be prepper siting on a stash of gear that would need a small truck to haul around.
Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cash on hand, a gun with ammunition, canned food, and bottled water. Contrary to popular opinion, people generally pull together in disasters rather than society falling apart. Good book on what happened in various situations ( 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans) * http://rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/ * htt…
Disasters, yes, not collapse.
Totally agree. Nuclear war is something completely different. There is nothing to come back to.
Resource scarcity would turn things violent really quickly for the survivors.
Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also disagree with his take here, but I think there is some merit to the advice of "understand what you've invested in". It's fairly hard to personally evaluate companies in a fund - it is somewhat easier to evaluate a single company (or even 10 single companies). If I assume he means "~40% of non-retirement emergency funds" I can let this skate by. --- I also think there's some risk to index funds precisely becaus…
It seems like Berkshire Hathaway would be as hard to evaluate as an index fund. For example, do you understand or even know the other companies they are invested in? At the same time, they are probably more diversified than most mutual funds.
Sure - if you pick an investing conglomerate like berkshire, evaluation is still hard.
It's less difficult (although still not a breeze) for companies like Tyson, John Deere, Cargill, etc. If you pick a major manufacturing company near you, that's producing non-luxury goods or essential goods, you can expect to have a reasonable idea of how they'll hold their value in adverse market conditions.
I want to be really clear - I'm assuming ALL of the advice in this article is "disaster planning" advice. It's not going to maximize returns, but it can give you ownership of an asset that is likely to survive things like rapid inflation, or other unexpected series of events.
Maximizing returns is often counter to this idea - because it almost always implies taking on additional risk, which is not ideal for disaster scenarios.
Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
#115Cash on hand, a gun with ammunition, canned food, and bottled water.
What use is cash in the case of a true catastrophe? And I don’t see the benefit of having a gun with or without ammunition. I would never ever be willing to shoot another person (or even an animal), even to protect myself or mine. I’d rather we are raped, tortured, and killed than harm another person.
Honestly, I think if you had resources you would eventually run into someone who would use violence to take those resources and the last line in your post is exactly what would happen.
Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enjoyed this comment. Vibes with an essay by Cory Doctorow about needing a “bug in bag” not a “bug out bag”, to run towards community to help versus running to the mountains, as you need collective action to survive. https://boingboing.net/2015/12/21/a-survivalist-on-why-you-s... https://boingboing.net/2008/07/13/postapocalypse-witho.html
That's how the Japanese do it. If you have noticed, they do a really good job of responding to disasters. In fact, one of the funniest aspects, is that the Yakuza (Japanese mobsters) often are the first ones on the scene, and seem to take pleasure at beating the government response. I suspect that part of the reason is that organized crime tends to have an incredibly robust infrastructure, hardened against unpredicta…
> Yakuza (Japanese mobsters) often are the first ones on the scene, and seem to take pleasure at beating the government response.
That's what mobs do. If you take the protection out of a protection racket, you end with an empty organization and people asking why they should pay you if they'll get beaten either way.
Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you are an active combatant in a war, or civil war, that's usually not your problem.
I plan to keep out of war. However those live in Ukraine a week ago you have no choice in the matter - I cannot ignore the possibility that the same might happen to me (though it does seem like a remote chance)
Yep, we are all (in certaim age groups and qualification levels) one general mobilization away from being meat for the meat grinder. The basic "this dangerous end of rifle, point at enemy, pull there" training will be provided in those cases so.
Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
#118> 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%. Any source? These figures seem absurdly high, and I say that as a former resident of NYC in the 90s.
I decided to run a binomial on it, because these sort of things can be quite counter-intuitive, and I was also curious! My only assumption was a lifetime of 80 years. And it turns out the magic rate to get a 40% criminal injury expectation (over a lifetime of 80 years) is if you're in an area with a violent crime rate of at least 6.4 crimes per 1000 people per year.
The FBI gives [1] a national violent crime rate (in 2019) of 366.7 per 100,000, so 3.7 per 1000. However, in the 90s the violent crime rate peaked at 7.6 per 1000 [2] and wouldn't fall below 6.4 until 1996. So the conclusion is that his numbers seem pretty much spot on.
Of course it's also somewhat misleading in another way though. Violent crime is not normally distributed and influenced heavily by demographics and location. Detroit has an aggravated assault rate (which is just one component of the criminal injury rate) of 15.2 per 1000 people, while Irvine, California has a rate of 0.2 per 1000 people. It's one of the many cases where the average doesn't really tell you anything at all about your own chances for an outcome.
[1] - https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
#119The 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. But many people survive, and a society quickly develops post-war. But it is dominated not by those who were most individually prepared, but by those who contributed the most to their neighbors and communities. There is so…
There was a Simpsons episode were they had a bunker but not for enough people. Flanders had not enough space and was left outside. Then everyine started to emerge from the bunker. People who think they want to survive an apocalypse so badly that they romantify a bunker live might not have thought through it deep enough. I want to be protected from a fallout so I can move out of my region after the fallout but that me…
Que Sera Sera
Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how the Japanese do it. If you have noticed, they do a really good job of responding to disasters. In fact, one of the funniest aspects, is that the Yakuza (Japanese mobsters) often are the first ones on the scene, and seem to take pleasure at beating the government response. I suspect that part of the reason is that organized crime tends to have an incredibly robust infrastructure, hardened against unpredicta…
(Speaking totally out of turn and without any sort of knowledge of the situation) The rapid response of the Yakuza may simply be opportunistic and predatory. Food, clothes, shelter, help to save precious heirlooms, those are all inflexible needs. Borrowing on "social credit" on inflexible needs can be exploitatively steep later. In the Yakuza-as-"helpers" model, they're taking advantage of chaos and economics theorie…
I'm not too versed in the subject but I have a feeling that in disaster scenarios it's better to take the Ronald McDonald House charity model than the payday loans model for organized crime.
People don't forget when you take advantage of them when down and they'll be loathe to do business with you in the future when they're not.
It's a PR move.