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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

I always found the prepper mindset a little curious. It seems to me that any kind of major disaster that would totally knock out reliable access to food and aid for 3-6 months (i.e. something worse than the recent hurricanes, more along the lines of climate-change-driven famine apocalypse) will also probably have knocked it out for far longer than that. What happens when one runs out of one's few months of stockpiles?

For those of the prepper mindset, it would make more sense to start homesteading instead. That is, learning to grow and preserve one's own food, instead of stockpiling a little food but in the end still relying on our national food supply network. Homesteaders, I think, will be the ones who survive the true nuclear/climate change apocalypse, not preppers.

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I think what seems to get overlooked a lot is location. Location is the most important part of the kind of survival the preppers expect to need. I mean that if you're near a large number of people who aren't preppers when that type of disaster strikes, and who aren't killed immediately in whatever the disaster is, they're going to come looking for anyone who has food. There will be millions of them, and they will have guns too. If they don't at the start, the strongest will find some and come for you. A couple of rifles won't keep you safe from that. There's no way you won't be overrun unless you have hundreds of miles of distance to any big population centers and more like a small town's worth of people behind defensible barriers with a well-organized militia.

> I always found the prepper mindset a little curious. It seems to me that any kind of major disaster that would totally knock out reliable access to food and aid for 3-6 months (i.e. something worse than the recent hurricanes, more along the lines of climate-change-driven famine apocalypse) will also probably have knocked it out for far longer than that. What happens when one runs out of one's few months of stockpiles?

I would expect that the world would go through several stages after such a disaster:

1. Disaster happens that destroys normal food production and distribution over much of the world.

2. Widespread violence breaks out as people realize help will not be coming and starting fighting over resources.

3. After a couple of months, the fighting and starvation have greatly reduced the population. Most who have survived are weak and out of ammo for firearms.

4. Those who had 6 month stockpiles and were able to keep them (either by being somewhere away from the violence, or by having sufficient arms to defend them) come out and start working with similarly prepared people to get farming going again in their area. They are in good health and have ammo for firearms and so can deal with any survivors of stage 3 who want to try to steal from them.

I don't think the goal when preparing for this kind of disaster is to live off your stockpile until civilization is back to normal--that would take way more than 6 months. I think it is to live off the stockpile until things stabilize and we have enough regional civilization to enable seriously working on rebuilding.

Eventually they build a spaceship and hire a hotshot ex-NASA guy to drive it forward and backward in time.

As the article points out, a large number of the purchasers aren't apocalypse preppers and the company itself is expanding its marketing efforts towards a more mainstream audience and successfully finding customers. So you're arguing against something the article only mentions in passing.

"...today, the major concern is environmental instability. “It’s not just the freak events. We get calls from people saying, ‘I live in Miami, and flooding is now routine. I’m worried Florida is going to be under water in two years,’ ” he says. “Or from people in upstate New York who experienced a 1-in-a-1,000-year blizzard and couldn’t get out of their driveway for two weeks. People who lived through the California drought, the forest fires of Texas and the Northwest, and who think maybe the government won’t come to their rescue when a disaster hits...."

I think you're over looking the impact that natural disasters can have.

Think about hurricane Katrina, or even the more recent season.

Just because there is some aid doesn't mean your access is reliable enough for an entire family.

There's never enough to go around to everyone who needs it, so the best you can do is be prepared.

Beyond that, on the west coast, there's concerns that there are massive earthquakes that have been overdue for a while and may occur sometime in the next couple of decades.

"There is a 17 to 20 percent chance that northern Oregon will be hit by a magnitude-8 quake in the next 50 years."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/a-major-...

Perhaps you could ask the Puerto Ricans whether they feel all their disaster preparedness was pointless because eventually they ran out of them, often before full fixes arrived, and that they shouldn't have bothered to prepare at all.

The problem as highlighted by PR is that the people most in need of that kind of help can least afford o adequately stockpile in case of emergencies. If you can afford to stockpile months of food and water, that’s great, but only if you can afford it.

And would you really watch other people's children starve and die and not give them anything? Obviously some people would, but I don't think that is the norm.

The best disaster preparedness measure you can take is to insist that people in PR are helped -- so if it happens to you, the expectation is assistance.

I reminded of the hunter-gatherer concept: the best place to store food is in another belly.

And would you really watch other people's children starve and die and not give them anything?(

I’m in a good position to help, but let’s say that I was also* desperate and starving and so were my children? If I have to choose between other kids, and my kids, I choose mine. Worse, what if it were a situation in which helping revealed the degree of my preparation, and led to looting?

Eh it's a good idea that turns into a bit of a hobby. As with a lot of hobbies practicality goes out of the window at a certain point in favour of continuing the hobby.

most amateur prepping is probably more on the scale of 72 hours-1 week

there probably isn't anyone alive today in the US who is ready to be entirely self-sustaining for six months...if civil society disintegrates for six months, it likely isn't returning

> most amateur prepping is probably more on the scale of 72 hours-1 week

Three days is the minimum for any part of the country that gets blizzards. At this point, I've gone to a week since last winter I was stuck at home for 3 days.

> there probably isn't anyone alive today in the US who is ready to be entirely self-sustaining for six months.

No, there are folks who would be fine for six months. Heck, there are still folks in rural areas that you don't see coming back to town to buy supplies in six months. The country is pretty vast and still has a lot of rough edges.

Places that regularly get snow don't really ever take 3 days to clear it, there is capacity to clear it continuously.

(I've lived in lake effect snow belts most of my life and never had a 4 wheel drive vehicle and have basically never worried about roads)

> Places that regularly get snow don't really ever take 3 days to clear it, there is capacity to clear it continuously.

With all due respect that's a load of hooey. Northern towns generally have capacity to clear a normal winter's snow. On the other hand, we have gotten well above a normal winter.

First, the snow event can last a couple of days. Even after the large amount of snow gets done, winds can exceed 30 mph with gusts above 50mph. This makes any sort of travel a non-starter. Worse are the storms that start with a sleet / light rain (early and late winter) and then freeze before the actual snows show up.

After the event, you are faced with moving the snow. Late winter storms are fairly brutal if the ditches are already filled with snow. This assumes you can get people to all the emergency equipment in a timely manner. This also assumes the budget is holding for all the overtime.

You can easily be stuck in your residence for 3 days and sometimes a week. Hope the power company is on the ball because that's a load of fun in itself. The 96 storm in ND had people stuck for a week if you were anywhere off the main route. Never mind the damage to the power grid and the setup for the 97 flood.

Absolutely. The "preppers" are idiots. You can't survive more than a couple of weeks, at best, completely off the grid without extensive training and preparation--certainly not in an urban or suburban environment.

The big one that people never seem to realize is that gasoline goes bad much quicker than you expect.

However, Katrina cracked the shell of the idea that the government will help out competently in a timely fashion. You may be on your own longer than you think. And planning for that is simply sane in areas like California (fires and quakes), the Gulf Coast (hurricanes), or the Northeast in winter (ice storms).

how can gasoline go bad?

After 6-12 months, gasoline starts transforming into a gummy plastic-like substance. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Stability. There are additives that extend the shelf life of gasoline (fuel stabilizers) but that only extends the shelf life to about 24 months at the maximum.

Diesel fuel also has a shelf life as well.

I just keep a sticker with a date on the cans and then occasionally pour a 5 gallon can into my truck and re fill it.

Thanks for responding to him.

I couldn't respond because I started getting the "You are posting too fast" message that somehow magically isn't actually related to time or rate.

What happens when one runs out of one's few months of stockpiles?

They expect to go and steal from others (and have others try to steal theirs).

That's one of the reasons they have very large arsenals.

Homesteaders and preppers aren't mutually exclusive.

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