Ask HN: Anyone else suddenly become a 'prepper'?
Maybe I'm neurotic, maybe I just need to vent, but increasingly I find myself beginning to consume prepper videos on YouTube and have seriously started making plans to shore up a 3 month food and water supply etc.
Curious if it's just people as neurotic/anxious as I am, or is there a more widespread trend towards it going on anyone is noticing?
Russia-Ukraine has been my hyperfocus for a long time now and I've been deep diving on international trade relationships, supply-chains, agriculture, and historical analogs to what is going on at the moment and I'm growing increasingly concerned by the day. It has tipped over into having a 3 month supply being the sensible position, at least for me anyway.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 96.5 ms ] threadThe main thing currently that no one seems concerned about is the reduction of grain production from Russia and Ukraine because of the war. This is going to have a global impact and will increase food scarcity that a 3 month individual supply can not do anything about.
This is the main thing that has gotten me worried. In 2010 there was a heatwave in Russia that affected the wheat harvest and in 2011 we had the Arab spring. There are an increasingly large number of failed states or states that are on the verge of tipping into that in that region of the world too. Lebanon's grain storage capacity was reduced to a month's supply after the Beirut explosion. Water tables are very stressed in Morocco which supplies the majority of the worlds rock phosphate which is the critical input into phosphate fertilizers which massively boost agricultural productivity beyond normal means. When you dig down into it it's clear the world is in a "food bubble" supported by over-pumping of water from aquifers, hydrocarbons, globalization.
The ripple effect the economics are going to have will be pretty far reaching.
For every one person who participates in a helpful community disaster preparation program, there are 20 who will instead look for ways to profit from a disaster and screw everyone else.
Even here in South Australia where we were had tiny numbers (a few 10s of cases a day), the supermarket shelves were stripped bare of toilet paper, sanitizer, hand towels, food).
People suck
I’ve always felt part of prepping should be to establish documents that details alliances and property rights with your neighbors and other preppers so when the government collapses you have a procedure to bring up a local rule of law and order very quickly.
Whereas folks in my neighbourhood all pitched in to do grocery runs for the old and infirm.
> … after every hurricane, you'd see dozens of guys driving around with 4 brand new generators in the back of their pickup trucks, looking to sell them to desperate homeowners for 10X their cost.
Those guys are doing good: they are taking generators to people who need them. You see only the price, not the fact that the person who pays that price thinks he is better off with a generator than with the money. And those higher prices incentivise other folks to bring in more generators, which means … everyone who needs a generator will eventually get one. That is how markets work!
Surges are one thing, but they're not going to end the system by themselves. There are other things which the supply chains can't deal with are what worry me more.
There are many reasons that having some surplus can stabilize your life, and they are not all about societal-level disruptions.
This is also why it is such a problem that so many people do not have the resources to do this.
In addendum, one does not need to go overboard in their prepping, or even seem like they're prepping. When my wife and I started prepping 4 years ago (before pandemic, before etc. etc.) we just began buying a little bit extra in our weekly shop. Cans last forever, sugar lasts forever if kept dry. Nobody's going to notice if you buy a big cube of toilet paper one week, then another the next week, and suddenly you have a 3 month supply.
Watching the news is honestly optional, and for me only brings anxiety. There's always going to be crap going on in the world and it's always going to be sensible to have some extra packed away.
If you happen to live in the USA, the Mormons have what they call Home Storage Centers, where I believe you can go in with your own food and use their equipment to preserve it, or you can buy food from them already preserved. Ask your Mormon friends, they're taught to prepare.
P.S. Some other, non-world-ending reasons to have a stash: Friend calls and tells you they're in desperate need of food, you can raid the cupboard and take over an emergency hamper without having to spend. Rains cut off your only bridge to town for a couple of days (happened to me recently). Floods, fires or drought in other parts of the country cut off supply chains for a couple of days, and while others are stripping the shelves bare, you can stay at home and avoid the doorbusters. Lots more reasons, and you don't have to be worried about world events to have it make sense for you.
I wouldn't consider anyone storing that much food or water to be "reasonable".
I live in a big farmhouse in the country, with multiples wells, barns, and pantries, so storage is not a concern at all. But I could see where it would be a problem for smaller homes and apartments.
250 gallons is just under 1½ cubic yards. It could easily fit in a closet.
250 pounds of rice fits into 4.8 cubic feet. It could easily fit into a shelf.
250 pounds of beans fits into 4.2 cubic feet. It too could easily fit into a shelf.
You would also need fuel for 90–180 cookings, but that too will fit into a relatively small area. Everyone with a home (this is part of why so many folks like a home!) and most people with an apartment could find enough spare space for three months of the bare essentials. Certainly everyone who has a place to live has enough space for 30 days' worth.
If the world becomes the kind of place where those preparations are necessary, it's no longer the kind of world that I'd like to exist in. Buying from fear-mongers is only going to hasten the onset of a world like that, so I'm going to try to relax, have a bit of fun, and enjoy myself while taking care of others as best possible (which in my case, isn't always particularly well).
(I'm hyperfocused on the conflict too, although I guess our responses to the situation are different)
That's my position in the case of a nuclear winter as that's fundamentally unsurvivable, so why bother right? However in the case of a total breakdown in global trade I'd be more willing to try stick it out.
Looking back at the historical record the collapse of the bronze-age civilization is the closest parallel I can see to what I would imagine will happen at some point to either us or our children. The best hypothesis I've seen on what happened there is there were a bunch of inter-dependent societies that traded with each-other by importing raw materials and producing finished goods and trading with others. There's evidence of drought over an extended period which led to both famine and migrations of people in famine affected areas to other locations in search of food that also brought people into conflict with each other and some evidence of internal uprisings from social unrest. Any one of those things in isolation seems not enough to take everything out, but when all occur at once it seems it caused a breakdown in trade which was sufficient enough to reduce the complexity of the society to the point that individuals that had come to rely on that complexity weren't able to survive it going away. There is a great talk on YouTube called "Social Collapse Best Practices" given by a guy who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union and he compares it how he thinks the US would fare in a similar situation and gives practical advice as he sees the same structural forces at play that brought about that collapse. This talk was given in 2009. I've been digging back as far into the past as I can on people giving doomsday predictions and back-testing what they say to assess accuracy, and a very clear trend emerges that everyone who focuses on the fundamentals is largely right.
It'd be a difficult, long grind back to normality with no guarantee of reaching a better or more equal world than today's (perhaps worse, given the way that resources were redistributed after the fall of the USSR, as I understand it).
If unrest really becomes that widespread, I'm off on the road with some books, the most-reliable, widely-compatible electronics available, whatever's left of my sense of humour, and a few stories.
I think this is a worldview that's very centered on humanity and civilization as it stands today, and not reflective of the wider human experience across space and time. Adversity and conflict has historically been the norm, and "The Long Peace" is a true anomaly in world history. What we're likely to see is more a "regression to the mean", so to speak.
>It'd be a difficult, long grind back to normality with no guarantee of reaching a better or more equal world than today
I would posit there would be zero way back to where we are today. Ever. The easy to access hydrocarbons that were available to be exploited initially are no longer available and the ones we exploit today require tools, and techniques that would no longer be operable or reproducible given their complexity. I think that's true for an astounding amount of technology. I recently took my car for a warrant of fitness and it passed, but I was told I will need to replace the tires at some point in the near future. I was also told no tires were in stock. I assumed this was just due to Covid related shipping delays, but then I recently learned there was a rubber shortage. Digging into it I found that Thailand produces a remarkable portion of the worlds rubber. There are all sorts of these linkages in the supply chain that if one were to completely give out would lead to everything else being on a pretty limited timeline.
>If unrest really becomes that widespread, I'm off on the road with some books, the most-reliable, widely-compatible electronics available, whatever's left of my sense of humour, and a few stories.
Looting is the obvious thing in the short term you sort of expect to occur, so having supplies enough to put you out of the craziness of that would damp down risks there. I guess one hopes that the population density reduces to the point where pockets of people that band together stop facing immediate security threats and resources once used by people who are no longer around can be utilized by those that remain and at some point in that equation an equilibrium will be found.
I'm curious what you've got though in terms of your own challenges to my view with respect to those paragraphs because I value accuracy in thinking, so if there's angles I've not yet had the opportunity to consider yet then I always like to know.
For a very long time now I've paid close attention to structural issues in systems, and for some reason that's just become my M.O. It seems like we're at a point in time where several structural issues brewing for years are all coming to a head at once and converging. The historical record has a clear pattern of one thing going totally sideways usually not being a big deal, but two or more things going completely sideways at once taking systems out of their safe operating envelope and introducing runaway feedback loops. The Nickel market on the London Metal Exchange is a recent example of this I would say. If it weren't for the negative feedback loop that was immediately applied things would have been very, very bad.
So... I'm watching this all very, very, very closely and I feel as if my feelings are justified. I think at this point, most people aren't neurotic enough.
* https://archive.ph/Dt5rs which is now released in a book https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/
* https://theprepared.com/ which is still a bit crazy
Now a days many are completely oblivious and have no clue although the government provides a handy guide to what you should keep [1] . Most have iodine pills at home as they are sent in the mail if you are close enough to a nuclear reactor. Everyone else can get them for free at the pharmacy.
In fact many don't know where their bomb shelter is, if it's not part of their home. Every home used to have a yellow plak which stated where the shelter is but because people are very mobile today the government will inform the public where they should shelter when an incident occurs. Also many of the bomb shelters are now used for other things such as storage. I remember as a kid when we bribed the inspector to come back later so we could clean out the shelter for inspection so we would not be fined. The shelters have active air filters and other requirements that were regularly inspected. At least you can now use them for storage and other things as long as you can clean it out in 24-48 hours.
Sirens are tested once a year and usually will freakout tourists which is entertaining to watch.
For anyone visiting or living in Switzerland I highly recommend downloading the Alert Swiss app [2] which will let you know what is going on like if you should close windows because of a chemical fire or if there is a siren test.
[1] https://www.bwl.admin.ch/bwl/en/home/themen/notvorrat.html
[2] https://www.alert.swiss/
Half an hour in to the rabbit hole my answer appears to be: perhaps learn how to use a shovel. There isn't a whole lot of useful info on the government website¹ for longer term problems², not even a calming procedure to deal with the pain from the typo emergency in the first URL.
¹ https://www.gov.uk/government/emergency-preparation-reponse-...
² https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-risk-reg...
I’m genuinely interested in slowing down and easing into homestead kind of lifestyle but mostly because building sustainable systems is just an interesting engineering problem to me.
The debt free/prepper aspects just add to the fun a bit.
If you rely on the land for your sustenance, and not just as a hobby, expect to spend an absolutely staggering amount of time, energy, and money (or more time and energy if you don't have this one) just getting it running, let alone running well.
We've literally been at this for decades, and are juuuuust getting to the point where this property might be able to sustain itself without our constant intervention.
In fact, yeah, just the opposite. Mowing my lawn with an expensive gas powered sit down lawn mower is fast… doing it with a manual push or scythe is slow, and more work.
I’m interpreting “slow” from more a macro perspective in relation to our worlds “2 day shipping” and groceries stores with anything imaginable.
Honestly, I think most people interpret it this way too.
I do however get a few weeks to few months supply of things like TP, water, canned foods.
Not because I'm afraid of war, at this point I'm more afraid of shortages.
- You need a self-sustaining (for at least weeks) nuclear fallout shelter otherwise I think the whole thing is pointless. This takes a lot of money and time to build.
- I can't legally own a firearm in my country
- IIUC even if a tactical nuke were to hit Ukraine, if you stay inside for couple days, cover and stay away from windows, use your own water, use air filter - the amount of radiation is going to be small enough to not be a health hazard.
- Firearm license is not that hard to get. It's just an excuse.
Maybe not in Poland, but there are plenty of countries where it is difficult to acquire a firearm license, or outright impossible (for the purpose of being able to have actual firearms at home). GP never outlined what country they are living in either, so not sure how you can tell them it's just an excuse.
I recommend starting slowly. Build up a week, then a few weeks. Buy ingredients and foods that you like and will eat. Avoid buying a "food supply" and instead increase your pantry that you rotate food out of in the course of a normal week or month. Make sure you also build up a relatively liquid savings. It's far more likely that you personally will face an economic hard time than it is for us all to be facing apocalyptic dystopia.
My church recommended for a long time having a year's supply of food for security. I think many people thought it was a forewarning of coming global destruction, but as I've reflected on it, it's much more about personal hardship and caring for oneself, family and community.
I personally think the best thing you can do to prep is to be ready to change your country of origin and to try out many different cities to get a feel for them and whether you could live in them long term.
I think the issue is that perhaps people are not prepared to leave their familiar surroundings (myself included) and therefore wait too long and therefore risk becoming refugees as a result.
Besides that fireplace, solar panels, heat pump, well insulated house, something for water, maybe add some knowledge about local flora and you can survive many years on that.
Add some means of meat conservation and you could easily last a year on less than 10 bullets. I don't have a prepper ways to conservate meat though (sausage drying, vacuum sealing and solar panels powered freezer probably wouldn't work).
1. You will never have a "bomb shelter". Dropping a crate in the ground is a good way to die from carbon dioxide poisoning and offers no bomb or bullet protection. At that point just have a house with a basement. Actual bomb shelters are a nightmare and do not last long. Metal rusts, the earth moves, and if someone wants to they'll plug your exhaust anyway.
2. Most foods, even canned, do not last that long. If youre canning yourself you have to add preservatives, even. Water does not stay good sitting, again, you'll have to have a method to treat it. However if you live in the country you already have a well. No you do not want short well. Think about how to deliver 240V30A for short periods for the well pump. The electrical systems to do this are expensive.
3. If you are actually having to live in a basement on limited food and water you're already dead. There is no scenario that you will have to do this and come out alive. If the world becomes post apocalyptic and people want your supplies they will get them. Doesn't matter if you have a giant vault. Play a bit of fallout to see what I mean. If nukes are dropping you're dead in months anyways.
Focus mainly on real, independent solutions to being self sustainable. Solar power, solar greenhouses, self defense, farming methods. Don't buy into rhetoric or belief systems. Have math lead you.
When it comes to construction people on YouTube are terrible. They build all sorts of things that will not live long.
This is my line of thinking here too. Though it seems necessary to additionally have that 3-month supply as a quick buffer while you build up your capacity for long-term solutions in parallel over time. I.E we're also starting a garden and considering investing in some way to run even a limited amount of off-grid power.
Edit: I'm actually not worried about bombs at all in my case, but more the complete breakdown of global trade.
A lot of people survived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That wasn't an exchange. That was a sucker-punch. I made a bet with my friends several weeks before Putin invaded that I think that's what could be on the cards for Ukraine because I didn't forsee any other way for him to win and concluded that he wouldn't accept not winning and it's really the only asymmetry he has. However, I don't think that would lead to an 'exchange' by any other nuclear power as that would just be suicidal and I'm sure Biden would rather live his comfortable lifestyle than kill everyone on earth.
My main concern is grain and fertilizer. I expect food price spikes and shortages. I don't expect shortages in the sense of starvation risk, more like - they won't have the brands or types of food we're used to. The stores are mainly protection for if goes worse than I expect.
Regarding nuclear, I've looked at what installing a bomb shelter would cost, but it's a nonstarter with my wife. Instead, we've just decided on where we'll go and what we'll do if we get the warning on our phones. Luckily, I still think nuclear exchange is highly unlikely.
That's probably true for where you and I live, but the higher prices for us is something we can afford, for others it's being priced out of the market. A certain amount of that may happen in our local communities or country, but there are places in the world that import a lot of food that will potentially face starvation on a bigger scale. My worry about that is bigger conflicts erupting either begins to disrupt shipping to the point where it spills over into hardships closer to home, and/or such disruptions break fundamental weak links in the global trade system i.e rubber supply from Thailand or phosphate rock supply from Morocco etc.
I'm not worried about a nuclear exchange at all. I don't think there's much point even being worried about it. That's one that if it happens it happens and oh well. I don't think it's likely, but I did make a bet with my friends several weeks before Putin invaded that given there was no way he would be able to accomplish his strategic objectives otherwise that his only option to ensure a win was to commit mass atrocity to force capitulation of the Ukrainian people, and my bet specifically was that he would drop a tactical nuke on Ukraine in order to try and do that. I think where the conflict stands now is in the recent few days we've hit another shift in strategy / tone from Moscow that we've hit a point where things are about to get ugly.
Rice, beans, water, propane stove. Nothing major, but I could shelter in place for a month or so, if I had to.
All my prepping is Russia-specific: making sure that my commercial VPN is paid for 3 years in advance, my self-hosted VPN is up and running, a European friend's credit card is added everywhere as the billing method, etc. My next work PC will run on Linux (normally I'm a Windows guy), and we had a lot of discussions about what we can do if our Internet "suddenly" becomes "sovereign".
No idea what to do about bricked iOS and Android phones yet.
As for me, I'm torn on staying vs leaving. This may seem irrational (and it probably is), but this is my home. I'll be perfectly fine in any European country on a day-to-day level, but I'll never be at home (and I'll need a thicker skin since we're the nazis now). There are people and places in Russia that I love, and my life won't be complete without them. I guess I'm just old.
On the other hand, we may soon live in a Gulag. I'm already cleaning the history of some of my Telegram chats when I go outside. People are getting arrested for holding a sign with asterisks ("*** *****") or just a blank sheet of paper, and you can get a prison term for a careless repost.
On the third hand, Russia may crumble. Our resources aren't unlimited. We are under the heaviest sanctions in history, our industry is a sham, our energy exports will cease in a couple of years, we've already committed 70% of our military to the war, and this won't end even if we "win" -- we'll need to provide police / counter-guerilla presence over a country that's 30 times (times, not percent!) larger than Chechnya, for at least a decade. And we'll need to rebuild a couple of Stalingrads to boot. I can't see how this is sustainable.
TL;DR: Decisions are hard.
Edit: On second thought maybe I should hedge that bet by inviting my wife's BJJ blackbelt coach to live with us as security in exchange for a share of the food.
Small renovations on house are now a bit bigger with the idea that my kids will live with us late into their 20's early 30's due to the price of housing.