The Rise of Luxury Doomsday Prepping | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of Luxury Doomsday Prepping

wsj.com

So assume governmental order breaks down completely, hordes of zombies ravage the earth, and you go hide yourself and your family in your "luxury bunker" in the badlands of South Dakota.

Then what? What's the next step?

We grab a pint at the winchester: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpCe36t6oC4

I felt a lot of the same way with more extreme prepping during the pandemic. Sure no harm with stocking up some extra staples. You’ll use them sooner or later. But if there really is some sort of complete collapse what then?

I really wish we had distinct words for "being ready for a disaster that might reasonably happen" versus "making a core part of your identity the idea that civil order might collapse, and gleefully anticipating being able to shoot people in the street without fear of law enforcement", because it feels like there's quite a wide spectrum there.

Being in California and preparing for wildfires and earthquakes for the few days before the civil authorities reassert themselves and things return to "normal"? A good idea. Anticipating an incident which collapses civil authorities beyond the point at which they can recover? Not only does this feel psychologically unhealthy I think it also ties into pro-collapse politics that actively speed up this outcome. Also tied into the deep American fear of that which pervades everything.

I’ve heard things like having a grab bag or an evac bag and things along those lines. The more common model than the pandemic is that you have to hightail it out of Dodge in your car in a hurry.

Over here in the cold Nordics I always keep warm blankets and at least two ways to make a fire in a small bag in my car.

The fire is just a bunch of (waterproof) matches and a few cheap Bic lighters and a german military stove from an army surplus store. Cost me maybe 8€ a decade ago.

In northern climes it’s really good idea to hav a kit in your car if you have a winter breakdown or go off the road for some reason.

Days of food at home absolutely. Some water containers ready to go yes. Some heating source either alcohol or gas bottles, reasonable and not big investments.

Going to weeks or months start to be reach.

And beyond that, what are you expecting to come back to? Subsistence farming? That is a very large step up... And well then you have lot of people to compete with. If we are talking about total systemic collapse, well that is very complex mess to prepare for.

On other side large scale wars, well probably some support will come relatively quickly.

Two weeks of food shouldn't be hard for most people on this forum. There's a lot of people whose financial situation is so permanently on edge that they can't do that kind of preparation for a healthy balance diet*, but for everyone here, two weeks should be fine.

IIRC, Mormons store a few months stockpile as standard.

* For an unhealthy diet, my university meal planning for a significant fraction of each semester was two large bowls of cereal in the morning and ramen noodles for dinner. I didn't realise how far below my caloric requirements that was until comments on this forum many years later. But that cost 50p/day in the UK in 2004, and if you're consuming 500ml of UHT milk/person/day then the six litre multipack one person can lug up a hill with no car will last 12 days before needing replacement, while dried grains and cereals like oats, rice, etc. are even easier to stockpile.

Not everyone I know has months of food storage, but I know a couple who lost their job during the pandemic and it helped them get through that.

Food storage is not just for apocalypse type stuff. It's for what the heck ever.

Given the relative practicality of disruptions of various types there were a ton of sensible things you could do for a few hundred dollars that weren’t really wasted money anyway. You didn’t need to fill rooms and load up on the automatic weapons and ammunition.

This is such a US thing. A rifle for hunting and self-defense, sure. Piles of fully automatic AK-47s that chew through 600 rounds per minute, not much.

And the old trope about ammo becoming currency, has this ever actually been a thing anywhere?

There's an interesting paper from WW2 about the shadow economy of a prisoner of war camp, fuelled by imports of Red Cross humanitarian parcels. Cigarettes became currency even among non-smokers. I'm not sure what the equivalent goods would be now.

Cans of tuna serve the same purpose in many jails.

I was being somewhat sarcastic and hyperbolic. Fully automatic weapons aren’t even legally sold.

Exactly. Prepping is so stupid. If order breaks down and our institutions no longer function, your neighborhood is going to be run by whatever warlord (read:gang) is best armed and has the most (armed) members driving around and taking everyone’s prepper stockpiles at gunpoint. Your bunker full of sparkling water and leftover TechCo swag t-shirts is just going to be added to someone’s hoarde, and you, the intrepid prepper are going to be shot or hauled off as someone’s slave.

Thus, because the worst possible thing might happen (according to the dubious logic of your listed chain of events) one is an idiot for making any effort to be prepared for a possible disaster? They should just resign themselves to losing everything somehow and thus do nothing anyhow?

You are using this logic to say it is pointless. They can use the exact same logic and say that's why their doomsday bunker needs to have a Lewis Gun or a Tank

you wait for the suckers left behind to do all the work like these people did all their lives, then return and still live better than everyone as capital accumulation will be preserved irrationally as it have always been.

Work on rebuilding civilization, this time without the problems of the one that just fell? If there's anything billionaires aren't short of, it's illusions of grandeur, and remaking civilization in their image seems like it would be right up their alley.

A lot of them have this idea of this sort of bank vault protection with a very heavy metal door. It’s like, okay, good luck.

Vault you say? Would they be numbered and have different experiments run in each? :D

They all have their weak points, that is air intakes. The best you can do is camouflage them.

"The Future" by Naomi Alderman was an entertaining novel, somewhere between mystery and thriller, set in the world of high-tech luxury doomsday preppers. I enjoyed it a lot. She either knows the SF tech world well or has access to people who know that world, because I recognised a lot of people I know (and the things they say).

Funny enough no one believes in human society to invest in measures that actually work. Why not spend more on the fixing climate change than hole up in a hole hoping the sea levels will go down?

Why not reduce plastic contamination than hoping to outlive all the accumulated micro plastics in your organs?

It seems the people with the wealth and power are focused on hoarding it rather than sharing it. I would say that they can’t see the big picture. But the reality is the “big picture” for them is one of cynicism and ruthlessness and they create the world they fear through a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The core selfishness of not wanting to get involved in fixing the problem because it might mean compromising your social status in the short and medium term has been a thing since we've known about the environmental risks.

Last week I’ve got a strep throat, and upon getting 10 days of antibiotics to treat it, I briefly went to the ChatGPT/gemini rabbit hole of a prompt

    “Is it possible to make antibiotics in a “shit hits the fan” scenario?”

and, as usual, majority of people are doomed. We’re too dependent on supply chains and modern tools.

Unless you literally have helicopter ready to fly in your backyard, you probably won’t be able to leave your urban/metropolitan area/suburbia

How long before the helicopter fuel runs out?

Hm? you only need enough to get from your city apartment to your private airfield with your jet, to take you to your bunker, once.

https://archive.is/MPkb2

Is it a rise? I remember reading about this stuff over a decade ago with a tv series about it

There's no rise. But journalists need to eat too.