You are confused. I am impatient with her and dismissive of her ideas, but I am not angry. I don’t care whether even sven has nothing at all or her own presidential bunker.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear: I don’t see a prepper’s function as ‘being of help’ in those situations; I’m talking about how the collapse of utility/police force/civil services leaves one to fend for self and family against local punks, looters, gangs, etc…not the public good.
Naturally, a local small unit cannot sustain itself ad infinitum-but, perhaps it can do enough to hold on until the emergency state has passed.
This exactly. You can’t stay awake 24 hours a day, every day.
You can’t stockpile many medications. At best insurance will cover 90 days supply. You can’t prep for a broken leg, an eye injury, or even cover your butt against infections because so many bacteria carry resistance. Do you want the responsibility for trying to take out your daughter’s appendix, especially when you’ve pissed off the doctor next door, much less the whole neighborhood?
The best way to survive is in a group of people, each with a skill such as butchering or shoemaking or some medical training. Nobody’s going to knowingly shoot the nurse or the dentist or the mechanic. Going it alone is crazy.
Wow, this is really something! But, can you explain why you dragged my post into it other than to key off of the word Cambodia, and using that to attack your interpretation of the policy of a President and his advisor who have been out of power for over 40 years, and whose party you are not a member of? Thanks.
Prepping isn’t about doing major surgeries-it is about prepping for what you can.
The whole group thing is a bit screwed up-you can bet that fully 60 percent (number pulled out of my ass) of the group will do/have done NOTHING in re: legitimate preparations and food storage, and will sponge off of/steal from/vote against the rest of the group that has done something. Then, when their supplies dwindle down to very small levels, that is when the beasts will arise within the group(s). That is much of what preppers are prepping against.
Gold and silver will *always *be a valuable commodity. Also, there will always be commerce, as long as there are people.
That’s what I’m saying.
Spousal immigration is pretty much the easiest aside from child of a citizen almost everywhere, why is it a non-starter? A lot of countries even have laxer laws than the USA and allow the spouse of a citizen to reside there while applying for permanent residency.
The most valuable commodities would be things that are actually useful to people in an apocalyptic scenario, in small communities trying to survive. Gold ain’t one of them.
Can’t eat gold. Can’t clothe yourself in gold. Etc.
The “City of Ember” series actually provides a lot of analysis into this kind of topic. In the second book, The People of Sparks, humanity has almost been wiped out by a series of four wars and three plagues, and are now living in scattered small communities. No more electricity or anything. Transportation is made up of animal-drawn vehicles (which, amusingly, are the hollowed-out shells of pre-apocalypse cars and trucks), bicycles, horses, and the shoe-leather express.
Basically, the ultimate TEOTWAWKI/SHTF scenario’s result.
One of the roamers (scavengers) arrives in Sparks with a load. What gets snatched up immediately are things useful for building, gardening, and such. Soap is mentioned and snapped up quickly. Clothing, the same.
Then comes jewelry, some of which is gold.
The only person in town who wants the jewelry is one of the local crackpots, who says they’ll use it to “pretty up their oxen”.
If you want commodities for an SHTF scenario, then look to food, medicine, clothing, solar/wind generators (and stuff to use the power, like lamps and fans), and perhaps also bicycles (and trikes, and quadricycles). They’ll get you a lot further than stuff whose only use is being shiny.
Gold and silver are most useful in that scenario because they are easily malleable. You can easily make a gold or silver cup. And they’ll be useful when the recovery happens.
Your post made me think about how, if Americans knew more about the outside world (“can’t keep track of those countries”) and specifically knew and cared about (and disapproved of) what their government was doing, there might be fewer such calamities.
I’m not sure what there is to interpret about one of the world’s richest countries bombing (on an enormous scale) one of the poorest.
Are you aware that at the time of the Cambodia bombings the Nixon administration was deliberately concealing those actions from the American public? The general public didn’t approve of it, they didn’t know about it. This was not due to ignoring other countries but because those actions were deliberately hidden. Probably because the administration of the time knew that the US public probably wouldn’t approve of the actions. For damn sure the public wasn’t approving of the war in Vietnam at that point.
So really, it’s a bad example for your stated purposes even if it is a good example of government corruption and secrecy run amok.
Sounds like the social dynamics will be completely unchanged from my normal working environment.
Obviously, a medieval reenactor would go *backward in time. * Duh.
Indeed. The point is that it was hardly the first such scenario of the US government bringing (or assisting in creating) societal collapse in other countries, so maybe a more vigilant public would have resulted in the US not getting involved in Southeast Asia to begin with. Also, much of the opposition to the war was really just opposition to the draft. Dying in vain is very controversial, but killing in vain is much less so.
I have a life and family of my own here. I am not abandoning my daughter (who lives mostly with her mother) or my elderly mother. Further, I have a job I can’t just r-u-n-n-o-f-t and leave when it looks like things maybe-might be going bad. If I misjudge, now I’m unemployed. Lastly, my in-laws are, themselves, very elderly and not in good health. They aren’t poor, but they also aren’t in a position to house and feed 6 or 8 refugees. While I have assets, much of what I have isn’t liquid enough to be of use in a foreign nation during a severe crisis.
“Have dual citizenship” as advice coming from somebody who already has it due to marriage, has (apparently) prosperous in-laws overseas, and (apparently) has nothing here that can’t be abandoned on short notice, is advice that is nigh on useless to anybody who doesn’t have exactly that situation already. It’s like advice from a Rockefeller on what to do if your car breaks down: Why, you just take one of your other cars, silly!"
…and they might need a source of fresh meat.
It’s not that much more ridiculous than buying a couple hundred acres of land out in the country that you can go hunker down on, which is something that a lot of preppers aim for. That’s something that’s just not feasible for a good % of Americans.
I wonder if the problem here is that you’re thinking we’re poking fun at disaster preparedness, when the OP and the rest of us here are clearly talking about doomsday preppers. See, from the OP:
You said you haven’t watched the show Doomsday Preppers, and maybe neither you nor people you know really qualify. The people I know who I refer to as preppers talk about The End of Times, and they talk about how their survival skills and the equipment they have might be useful in the end of times. However, I’ve no way of knowing if that’s just idle fantasy entertainment like when I watch The Walking Dead with my friends, or if they really think that there’s a significant risk of total societal collapse.
I think even sven’s point is that for someone who really does think that there’s a significant risk of the total collapse of US society, having foreign connections is probably a fantastic idea. We’ve seen from the breakdown of other governments that getting the fuck out of dodge has proven to work wonders, whereas (as others have pointed out) I’m not sure we’ve seen the same benefit to having some gold in a cabin out in the woods. So even though getting dual citizenship is hard, and having some foreign connections might not come naturally to some people, if you really think the US is going to collapse, isn’t that worth the effort?
People on this board have spoken disparagingly about having so much as a pre-packed overnight bag on hand, so you are no more than partially correct about the problem. I don’t watch the show or even know anybody who does. The people on it may well be religious fanatics or political fringe dwellers or some other group it is safe to mock here. I still suspect that they probably aren’t quite the way the show is edited to present them IRL. Based on what has been revealed about other reality shows, like the one about the Amish Mafia, the whole thing may well be little more than fiction.
FTR, I don’t believe one can prep for doomsday. One survives a major asteroid impact or nuclear war or Captain Trips flu by luck of the draw.
??? What thread was that? It certainly wasn’t this one.