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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

Three days seems low, but any resilience is better than no resilience.

Well, there is always the question of who’s gonna pay for that resiliency. We see it all the time in software deployment. After each extended outage of a major network or cloud/service provider, there is always a flurry of sudden interest in disaster recovery, multi-zonal deployments, failover solutions, and redundancy up and down the chain of everything. 6 months or a year later, people and organizations get sick of paying for that. They either nerf it, making it just a useless checkbox or just abandon it completely because “if us-east-2 is down, then everything is down. Who cares”. A couple of years pass, then another incident happens, rinse and repeat.

These stores are not supposed to prepare you for three days of resilience in advance.

They are meant to be available as reliable and functioning stores throughout a crisis period. Your go-to destination for purchasing vital goods during the crisis.

It's the local supermarket. How many days in advance am I supposed to have food for? (I have prepper quantities of food and don't know what's normal. three days seems pretty normal to me.)

A big chunk of society has realistically 2-3 days of groceries in their house, plus maybe a 5-year-old bag of rice or pasta and can of string beans buried way in the back. If you have a 1-6 year old you're probably buying 1-3 gallons of milk per week, and need to get more tomorrow.

After covid, we keep a stock of extra dry goods on hand. If you need that much milk, it can just be frozen when found on sale. As long as it completely defrosts, you don't get any ice

You can also get shelf stable, canned, or powdered milk. That way you have it even with a power outage.

A Camp Chef or Turkey fryer is also a great investment for this purpose as they are very useful on their own, and double as a gas-powered source for cooking in an emergency. They can also boil large pots of water quickly should you need

As much as I detest organised religion, the Mormons have a pretty good take on this. They strive to have a six month supply of food/water/cash on hand at all times.

I get it. But on the other hand, if you in a situation that requires a six month food supply, because there is no resupply available and you can’t relocate, you have bigger problems. Like the mob of hungry people outside your house.

If you have a six month food supply, and survivable disasters really only need a week or two tops, you will have no reservations helping out your neighbors, which helps you be a positive influence on your community in time of need.

If you've only got two days supply, you may not be so generous.

That’s a good point I hadn’t considered.

Exactly. There are surely some people that will be stingy (as Mormons are humans after all) but there's a huge emphasis on being able to help out the neighbors and the unprepared in a bad situation. Depending on the area too, they even have rough distribution/response plans in place so they aren't starting from scratch during an emergency. You'll occassionaly see comments like "I'm stocked up so my family is fine while all the city people are eating each other" but (anecdatally having lived in heavily Mormom areas most of my life) the vast majority do not feel that way. Even some of the people who I've heard said that, I'd bet a huge amount they would not sit by and watch another human starve

They may begrudge the 'city people', but they probably won't begrudge their neighbors. It's also nice to have someone to help eat your disaster food :) I've done small preparations before, and you've got to cycle it out for freshness every so often[1], which means someone has to eat it... might as well be you and your neighbors. If you're in a community of like minded, well prepared neighbors, maybe you can get some variety at least.

[1] My elementary schools had a good program of bring in canned food at the start of the school year in case of emergency, have a picnic to eat it in the last month of school. I also did have a disaster can when I lived in California; I'm less prepared at the moment.

I think about that too. My home is isolated with plenty of firewood, well water, solar power and a backup whole house generator with weeks/months of propane. I'm unlikely to last more than a few days into the apocalypse without it all being taken from me by someone stronger or better armed.

No reason not to solve the smaller problem though.

I'm in Utah and the idea isn't that you're going to be a lone wolf and somehow survive in a bunker then come out in 6 months. The point is that you should have plenty of extra supplies on hand for your family, friends, and neighbors. Instead of a mob people are more likely going to work together instead of fighting over a bag of rice.

This is why it's important to build a diet with grains and beans. They are cheap and last for months/years at home if stored properly. So you can easily have enough stored at home to eat for at least a few weeks.

Three days is realistic timeframe for restoring power and rudimentary network connectivity.

They're realistically not preparing for a zombie apocalypse

If power goes out really bad, there's some kind of major weather event in some part of the country etc 3 days is a reasonable time frame for emergency measures to be put in place

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