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Comment by notch656c | Hacker News Reader

If you have enough money in the bank to buy groceries you have enough money to take out of the bank and put in your mattress for groceries.

Also HN will probably get upset for me saying this but a few grams of gold or silver or other goods easily tradeable like whiskey or ammo never hurt anybody and might buy you a pig to slaughter or something.

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> few grams of gold or silver

I remember, a few years ago, Cupertino being targeted for burglaries because the Indian and Taiwanese immigrant populations had a penchant for storing wealth in gold and silver and cash under the mattress, respectively. The victims’ recovery rates and timelines were far poorer than these BofA customers’ will be.

Which is an interesting comparison because these are not the only immigrant populations that do this, there are large groups of immigrant populations in Texas who are largely unbanked or underbanked or have cultural penchants for using gold and silver as stores of value, but there has been no concerted effort to burglarize them, because strings of home invasions in Texas usually end up with the home invaders in a body bag regardless of who they decide to target.

Can you help my understand why this article cites a higher per capita burglary rate in Texas than California (it claims the data is from the FBI)? https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statist...

Why does Texas has so many reported burglaries though?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232539/burglaries-report...

Probably because these statistics are based on reported burglaries as opposed to the actual number of burglaries. It's my impression from various threads and news articles that people in California have given up on reporting all sorts of crimes due to the lack of prosecution.

Must be the same situation in Florida then?

California is a big place with a lot of varying community attitudes... that sounds like quite a big assumption.

Because stolen guns are very valuable and the owners have to officially report them stolen to avoid all the possible criminal charges.

People report gun theft in order to make possession of it unambiguously a crime same as with cars and other serialized property.

Nobody with a brain actually thinks the police in the next state over are gonna seriously suspect them of something when their handgun inevitably gets recovered in an unrelated crime.

1: The data is obviously completely bogus unless you believe there were only 11 burglaries in Florida in all of 2021. You can't draw anything from it.

2: Texas is the second most populous state, so total # has little value. You need the per capita number to understand whether their might be some deterrence happening. Unfortunately the Statista data is garbage, so it isn't worth calculating.

So where is a good source of data?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...

Statista is proven untrustworthy, so I'd start with the FBI UCRs:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s

Thanks for that link. Looks like its a mixed bag between Texas and California. Out of the 9 crime statistics, California is better for 5 while Texas is better for 4. And sometimes the differences are small. For example for burglary, the rate is 392.8 for Texas while 392.8 for while 386.1 for California.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

This is false.

Texas and California are roughly tied in burglaries per capita, 370.7 and 369.7 per 100,000. New Mexico has the most, at 648.8/100,000. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...) Interestingly, New Mexico has a bit more than three times as many guns per capita as Texas. (https://www.statista.com/chart/21894/firearms-in-each-state/)

Property crime rates are going to be suppressed in Texas among the (undocumented) immigrant population because of a justifiable lack of trust between them and police. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.22221) The NCVS should give better data, but I'm damned if I can find it.

That happens a lot in many segments of the population. When my uncle was detective, there were similar incidents among the orthodox Jewish community, as the cultural preference from the diamond trade was instant settlement. It’s also easier to move gold across borders. Many folks were hesitant to call the police which made it worse.

Prepper people get targeted alot as well. One dude in my hometown was a victim of a home invasion, held hostage and lost about $250k of guns, ammo and silver. You don’t hear alot of about this stuff because typically these communities are not exactly following the letter of the law from a tax perspective.

He could have prepared better.

The recovery rates and timelines are only relevant for the cost. The key part is that its failure is uncorrelated with bank failure. It's not either/or, but rather multi-source redundancy.

I've been saying this for a long time: https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/

Cash isn't illegal yet. Use it.

Don't use any one system exclusively. Even if you rely wholly on your normal person checking account and electronic payments, have a few grand stashed away in your house in cash. Sometimes the lights go out, and ATMs with them.

hey, this is pretty neat to see a word count summary up front

> ( 2341 words, approximately 13 minutes reading time. )

I'd love to see that in every article and perhaps have some css setting that I could globally twiddle for every website so folks could opt in or out as they please. I suppose an extension could possibly tackle it too if the semantics are correct on the page.

Firefox reader view gives a reading time estimate.

You're responding to a concern about society with a suggestion for individuals. It may be good advice for individuals, but do you think most people are going to follow it?

Great response - even if I can buy a pig with bullets it doesn't help anything else. That assumes you can butcher and store the meat. This seems like a kind of bikeshedding argument - the bike shed is built so don't worry about the actual nuclear reactor, you can always just hide in the bike shed. Doesn't matter how well built the bike shed is - you're still surrounded by nuclear fallout

People have no trouble conceptualizing insurance. We have car insurance, home-owners insurance, life insurance, etc.

But what about "every day life" insurance? It doesn't take much cash on hand or some staples in the cupboard to protect against a wide variety of temporary "glitches" in life. Glitches can be anything from surprise weather events to things like your bank accounts becoming temporarily unavailable.

Importantly, insurance is not an investment we intend to get a return on. It's a cost.

Heh, I didn’t even notice the covid paper products shortage on accounts of having every day life insurance in the form of a Costco membership and having bought toilet paper some months before. Buying in bulk isn’t even a cost, the cost of capital sitting idle in the form of a shelf of stuff I won’t need for a long time is more than made up for with the volume discount.

Not only are the bulk beans a tiny fraction of the cost per bean, they’re fresher and higher quality.

Also it is an investment that returns in time savings. Buying 50 rolls of TP takes the same amount of time as buying 1.

Same here, we try and keep 3 months supply of groceries on hand from costco at all times. Once a month we look through what won't last 3 more months and stock up, and once you actually figure out what you need it's surprisingly cheap. For example we skipped our December trip because of the holidays and so spent around $1100 for our family of six. Which sounds like a lot but when you stretch it out over 2 or 3 months that less than $100 a person. I'd recommend everyone who can does this.

you have any tips for managing expiration dates? Me and the wife were getting into this subject recently. I'm considering buying a barcode scanner and just have an in and out spreadsheet that somehow I manage. Still tinkering with a few ideas. We have a big family and there's potential for a lot of food waste if not managed properly.

The way we do it is we just take the new stuff and put it at the back so the oldest stuff is at the front. The other thing is we only buy things we know we eat regularly. So we have 3 months worth of applesauce, goldfish crackers.

We also freeze anything that isn't in a can or a sealed, so bread we usually buy 4 loaves and freeze 2 or 3, and accept we'll have to get more from the store before we go.

The limitation is we can't get things from Costco that aren't used regularly, for example, we don't go through enough cream cheese to buy Costco size, and it doesn't account for all our food needs. But if tomorrow I lost my job we know we could survive without having to go to the store for anything but milk and eggs* for the next month or two.

* Hopefully we'll remedy this in the summer with chickens.

Yah physical arrangements to support turnover are good. That's so true on that point about the rate of consumption for different food types is just irregular.

I've been contemplating somehow tracking the pounds of food bought per trip as a quick informer on the spot. The tricky thing is that the kids are growing so their consumption has a steady ramp but not yet enough for a timely consumption of stuff like cream cheese etc. Lots of products seem to be in the 2lb range. 2lb is actually a good deal of food I'm finding out.

The problem with buying in bulk is that it requires the money up-front and that works only if you can save enough money at least once. Poor people can be permanently cash-strapped, so they never manage to get to the point for that upfront investment.

Money up-front AND storage space.

I can't help you with the $ problem, but if storage space is your limiting factor you can buy commercially packaged "survival food" that comes in #10 cans and/or 5-gallon buckets. A 2-week supply of food at 2k calories per day takes up about 2 5-gallon buckets. #10 cans can be stored under a bed. You'll additionally need water and a way to heat it. I think most of them can be eaten cold, but that seems very unpleasant.

This, obviously, is a different strategy than buying bulk and cycling through your regular eating. A 1-2 week supply is plenty for most people. You aren't trying to become a prepper, you're just wanting to get through a crazy blizzard/hurricane/whatever.

...and transportation

For elaboration, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

This only works if you don't live in a dense city. People in cities simply don't have space to store (many) bulk purchases, and the stores near them (i.e. that don't need a car) don't sell things in bulk (transporting bulk items by public transport is not feasible, and it's too expensive by Uber).

When I visit friends who live in dense cities they are very excited that I have a car, and often ask me to take them to make some bulk purchases.

I don't think that's accurate. The bigger issue is economic access - poor people can't afford to stock up since they are often living paycheque to paycheque. Even middle class folks living in dense urban centres have access to car shares and delivery services. Yes there is a cost, but it's usually quite cheap.

As for storage, except for the smallest apartments, most storage spaces can be optimized quite a bit for very little cost just by purchasing containers that fit spaces properly, have good seals, and abandoning commercial packaging, especially for products that are packed for shelf appeal, not bulk storage.

> poor people can't afford to stock up

Sure, that's a problem. But that's not the problem I was talking about.

> have access to car shares and delivery services. Yes there is a cost, but it's usually quite cheap.

It is most definitely not cheap! You can't buy much because you don't have room, and the cost savings of what you can buy are destroyed by this added expense, making it pointless.

> most storage spaces can be optimized quite a bit

Sure - up to a point. I mean you can also just fill your bedroom with stuff, and have a narrow corridor to walk in. But realistically, people in dense cities just don't have much space for bulk purchases.

I think "1 kilo of food per person per day" is a reasonable approximation (e.g. 1kg of dried beans is 3300 calories, 1kg of canned tuna is 1300 calories). 400 kilos of food should be enough to last a family of 4 for 3 months. Efficiently packed, you can fit 400kg of food in a 0.5m x 1m x 1m space (1 large kitchen cabinet).

It's a fair bit of space, but it's not a "fill your bedroom with stuff" amount of space.

The problem with efficiently packing that is you won't have access to it easily, in order to rotate stock.

If you are not careful you'll end up with spoiled food when you need it.

Plus there's a lot more to stock than just food - It's not just about disaster preparation, we're also trying to save money and packaging and resources.

I know this subthread is talking about saving money, but imo that shouldn't be the first priority. The first priority is avoiding disaster. Insurance costs money up front. The "cost" you are insuring against is being without food after a hurricane/blizzard/etc. If you can ALSO save money up front, that's great.

I live in a downtown highrise, have a car. It works with a shelf for added storage which takes up 5 or 6 sq ft. Having the space for, say, a chest freezer, would up my game a lot but I can do plenty of bulk purchases with what I have.

The lack of space is annoying though still.

If you live in a dense city, you may be better served by getting a commercial "emergency food supply" product. A 2-week food supply from one of the major suppliers of such products is about $125 and fits in 2 5-gallon buckets. Alternatively, you can get similar foods that come in #10 cans, they store nicely under a bed.

I use these products for backpacking and they will obviously never match a real home-cooked meal but they are decent in a pinch.

That covers you for food (you will need water), and just expanding your paper goods slightly should be plenty. You're not trying to become a "prepper", you just want to get through a bad week.

I always figured the cost of the additional square footage in a home per property tax etc was part of the equation. There's some cost for additional size usually. But if you're already paying that cost better to get some use out of it in the form of bulk storage for sure. I suppose there's a freedom to store in having that space. I like the time saving angle, I was looking at old receipts last month and am always stunned by the slice of life they capture. I had transactions where I'd go buy filtered water. Since buying a RO device I never had to haul water any longer. Such a different time of life, definitely saving time there.

I was right there with you. Dealing with the deliberately obfuscated price/sizes of TP/PT bothers me, so my life is much improved if I only do it ~once per year. And paper products are exactly the type of thing you can easily put on the top shelf of a closet and stack to the ceiling.

In the event that you are trading gold and silver and ammo, your first problem will be holding onto your gold and ammo in the first place. Which means if you are prepping for this scenario, your first order of business is to be part of a tribe willing and able to defend you.

This is why I believe leadership in urban environments would quickly turn over to existing city gangs in a collapse scenario. Maybe the police would be one gang that controls a fraction of the city.

Urban gangs already have the required tribal associations, intimate understanding of the terrain and resources therein, and the propensity to commit violence that would be required to take control.

Any of us good citizens who keep our heads down, go to work, avoid violence at all costs, and individually prep for a collapse without building existing association to a coherent tribe will end up quickly dead or subservient to these existing tribes.

The question is, in total societal collapse situation do you want to live? I am not sure I would want to.

I'd just want to stick around to see how things panned out, it'd be pretty interesting.

If we're in a situation where society devolves to the point where people have to trade whisky or ammo for a pig to eat then half of us are going to end up murdered for anything valuable to begin with.

If it gets to that point we're (or at least a non-trivial fraction of us) gonna end up murdered not because people want what we have but because by the time things fall apart like that people will hate us and want us dead.

French revolution, Russian revolution, Europe's religious wars during/after the reformation, etc, the professional classes of people who built and maintained "the system" don't tend to do to well at the hands of everyone else when it finally keels over.

Slaughtering a pig isn't some trivial process, it requires skill and equipment that most people lack. But even if it was doable and a person trades their emergency gold for a couple weeks of food, then what? Any disaster that reduces society to pig bartering isn't likely to be fixed in a short amount of time.

A month or so of salary in cash at home, and some "hard assets" is a good hedge.

Under what situation could that possibly be useful where all society hasn't collapsed?

You're not going to lose access to your bank account because the bank failed; the FDIC handles that. It just moves to a different bank over the weekend.

Locked out because Chexsystems thinks you're a financial criminal is more in the direction of possible.

I've had banks go technologically tits up and render my funds inaccessible for multiple days in the past. Card payments fucked, etc.

Has happened to more than one bank I've used, in more than one country.

I've also had a bank freeze my account temporarily (for over a week) because some risk algorithm somewhere thought fraud was occurring.

All those times, having a bunch of cash handy was very useful.

As for hard assets: they make a decent hedge against financial shithousery.

> Under what situation could that possibly be useful where all society hasn't collapsed?

In a natural disaster type situation it could easily be the difference between being able to get what you need stay put the whole time or running out of some supply you didn't think you'd need and having to evacuate half way through the follow-on mess and losing quite a bit to looters and/or the environment.

The other person who replied mentioned more mundane stuff.

As some other replies have said - the best and most reasonable hedge is to rely on your community and have good bonds there. Doesn't matter how much cash you have if people don't care about that anymore, the best option is to have social bonds and have a community to support you, no person is an island etc

$100 under your mattress for the future is not worth nearly as much as giving that money to a friend to help them cover rent today

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