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Comment by dbasedweeb | Hacker News Reader

There’s also no way that any amount of your preparations will materially improve your chances. If you stockpile, and civilization collapses, you will be raided for your stockpiles by stronger, better armed people. There will always be stronger, better armed people. If you prepare to live off land, how is that going to work when the land is dead?

There’s no escape for you or your family, except averting disaster in the first place, or death. Unless your prepping amounts to a suicide pact, then it’s just a fantasy to keep you from being too afraid. As comforting fantasies go, prepping seems like a particularly expensive and time-consuming one. Unless you’re desperate for the illusion of control, your time and money is better spent elsewhere.

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You should prepare for disasters as they really happen. Could you survive OK in Portoriko (or your local type of similar disaster)? Would you have way to generate power at least to have light and radio? Do you have friends in other countries/places that would help you relocate? Do you have water and food for few weeks to survive initial blast? What about medicine you need? Do you have cash to buy basics until electricity is setup again?

But you are right that if you prepare too well. So well that it's visible, it is likely that it will be taken from you. Or you can end up as that guy who prepared for zombie apocalypse and lost it all (100k USD invested) in hurricane.

It will never (with exception of all out nuclear war) be total world annihilation. Yet most people seems totally unprepared for stuff that just keeps happening. And it will likely be getting more frequent with climate change.

Why wouldn’t people band together to rebuild, share resources and fight off robbers? Have a little faith in people! That said, maybe the typical “prepper” dream is to be isolated in an apocalyptic scenario, but more likely neighbors need to get through a food or electric shortage.

Why would you trust people in your "band"?

Won't you worry they'll knock you off in the night so there's one fewer person to share with?

Because then again you are not prepared for raiders as you have fewer manpower to defend yourself.

> There will always be stronger, better armed people

I we're running from a lion I don't have to be faster than the lion, just faster than you.

I lock my doors for the same reason. My lock won't keep out someone determined to get in but they'll dissuade a casual opportunist.

Find me the casual opportunist in the apocalypse; it would all be starving lions, and a lot of lions. If you want a preview, study famous famines and sieges, like the siege of Stalingrad, and the Holodomor. I’ll say it again, prepping for something other than limited disaster (i.e. a hurricane or earthquake) is only realistically achieved by trying to avert doom, or buy a gun and as many bullets as your family has members.

> it would all be starving lions, and a lot of lions

90% of us would be better classed as the gazelle in this analogy. Even the lions would be fighting each other for dominance.

> If you want a preview, study famous famines and sieges, like the siege of Stalingrad, and the Holodomor

Most hardcore preppers either live outside a city or plan to escape the city pretty quickly, so I don't know what Stalingrad is supposed to prove. Were their people with remote bunkers and years of food supplies when holodomor happened?

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