If SHTF are you prepared? | Hacker News Reader

If SHTF are you prepared?

garybasin.com

3 pointsgbasin9 comments

There has yet to be a mechanism for how and why shit hits the fan. If someone can propose a non-handwavy path to it, then I'll start to prepare.

But also, I've planted a garden, I've started getting to know my neighbors, I'm looking at buying land. All the preppers I know emphasize that it's the community that's gonna make or break how it all turns out, not one guy hoarding bullets and AKs

Fact is, you can't eat bullets or guns. Growing a garden and preserving food are not only valuable skills, but also good for you in so many other ways.

In the absence of police protection, how do people plan to prevent their gardens from being pilfered? Seems to me that both sets of skills are needed.

I have a hard time believing that the only thing that's keeping people from stealing shit is that there's a cop with a gun somewhere down the line.

Is that the case for you? Or anyone else you know?

If you know how to garden, help other people garden. That way your neighborhood will have enough food and might even be able to help out others that need it.

> "I have a hard time believing that the only thing that's keeping people from stealing shit is that there's a cop with a gun somewhere down the line."

How many news articles about porch pirates have there been? That's just the tip of the iceberg; I certainly have had a number of things stolen just outside my home over the years.

Porch pirates are capitalizing on the fact that people order shit off the internet that costs a lot of money, that the goods will be replaced if they're stolen, and that people are not at their houses most of the time.

In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, you really think you're gonna be spending a lot of time at the office, getting things drone delivered to your house?

Guns vs Gardens. It's really about different mindsets.

The argument for guns basically boils down to a zero-sum game mindset. It's all about taking or protecting a limited supply.

Gardening is a positive-sum game. A single seed can produce tens to thousands of copies of itself. No other investment has such a high ROI.

Agreed. I also think that humans are different now than they were 2000 years ago - we have a sense that great things can be accomplished peacefully, and have ways of going about doing it.

I imagine the SHTF moment is not just one thing, but several very unfortunate happenings at the same time. Think power and water outages, people rioting in the streets and looting stores, police unable to contain them without being demonized by the media so they just don't do their job, adversaries from other countries seeing the chaos as their time to act with whatever they've got sitting around in store for us, bad actors trying to inflame the situation further, etc. If only one of these things were happening at one time, we could deal with it. But if everything falls apart at the same time, civilization goes out the window. I assume.

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