
Doomsday planning for less crazy folk - mcone
http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/
======
AndrewKemendo
The major thing overlooked here is mindset. After 14 years in the military and
experience with several armed conflicts and humanitarian disasters, I have
seen that pretty much all your plans and preparation will go out the window,
so you need to learn to move adapt and improvise.

If you're going to survive any contingency scenario you need to be resilient,
excruciatingly innovative and mentally tough. Think more like MacGyver and
less like Dr Strangelove.

Be minimal, learn how to forage and scavenge, learn how to blend in and get
along and take nothing for granted.

The most successful trait I've seen in survivors it's to know when to stay put
and when to move. Whether it's hiding from a mob or a bear, or finding a
different county or state to go to.

Take risk when necessary but not unnecessarily.

Again, having the right mindset, through intentional training is the key.
There are all kinds of survival schools and the best ones will teach you this.
I suggest adventure traveling as a start. That means you go someplace with no
plans and the most minimal of supplies.

Edit to add: The key problem with most prepper folks and this article is that
they take an approach of "alone and unafraid." Things like stocking up for
months and having all kinds of weapons. In practice this is just a great way
to get your cache raided by a group of scavengers. In reality you need to find
or create a small community of survival minded people that can work together
successfully over a long period with a variety of skills. As humans we need
groups for survival, so the best bet in a crisis is to build a resilient
flexible community until things settle down.

~~~
f-
[Author here]

The mindset is actually a large component of this guide, and it intentionally
delays any discussion of "prepper gear" until it gets through a long laundry
list of lifestyle tips and discussing the need to plan ahead, figure out what
is likely, what can go wrong, what the decisions points may be, etc. In
contrast to most other prepping docs, weapons are literally the last thing
discussed, and only in a perfunctory way.

That said, I think that your view of emergency preparedness is far more narrow
than what I aimed for in the guide. A significant focus of the doc is dealing
with small-scale but common adversities, such as recessions / unemployment,
house fires, backed-up sewage, and other "boring" but life-altering
contingencies. Basically, the stuff that almost everybody will need to face at
some point in their lives.

I'd wager that for 90%+ of the events that a typical person in the US is
likely to experience, heading into the woods to forage on berries and hunt
wildebeest is not the way to go.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I dunno, I re-read the beginning and I didn't see anything about the points I
raised. I think your point that overzealous people who as you put it:

 _begin by shopping for ballistic vests and night vision goggles; they would
be better served by grabbing a fire extinguisher, some bottled water, and then
putting the rest of their money in a rainy-day fund._

is right on point, but IMO that just says - hey don't be insane.

Literally right now, my good friends are being rescued from a rooftop in
Houston. No number of bottles of water in their basement or generators are
going to help them. They are lucky in that they have some discretionary funds
and Flood insurance, but more likely than not (if history repeats itself) they
wont get fully paid out for what they lost.

What they should have done is learned when to move or when to stay by: 1. Not
buying a house in Houston and then 2. Gotten out well before it was imminent.

Small scale common adversities like you are talking about can get critical
really quickly. All those preparations, other than just having savings, is
just making you slightly more comfortable and buy you a little bit of time so
that you can make a bigger plan. Good, but insufficient and gives you a false
sense of security. Again, these are things I've seen over and over.

Planning for the range of disasters from a month of unemployment and TEOTWAWKI
is the same basic mental change, not just a full basement and bank account.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Is there a middle ground? My kids went as part of a team to help people
rebuild after Katrina and one of the folks they met was rebuilding their house
but building it as a boat. They had re-done the foundation so that the house
rested on it, and its sewer connection was just the house pipe inset into the
city pipe (so it could easily lift out). That, 15' of chain to allow the house
to float above the foundation and central concrete and iron pillar which was
essentially the keel.

I thought of them reading about Harvey and I am wondering if they will show up
on the news at some point.

I compared it a bit to my efforts to insure my house remains intact and
upright in the event of an earthquake (the 'likely' disaster where I live).

~~~
AndrewKemendo
There certainly is a middle ground - however why stay in the same place and
expect a different future? New Orleans isn't that much more prepared for
another flood. Houston re-did the entire bayou system about 5 years ago and
yet here we are.

People's aversion to moving, especially after a major disaster, boggles my
mind.

~~~
giardini
Well, they really didn't "redo the entire bayou system". They considered
alternatives and chose the most politically correct one for the parties
involved. They knew it wasn't enough for something like Harvey but they didn't
think there would be a Harvey( a supposed "500-year event") anytime soon.
Black Swan anyone?

AndrewKemendo says: "People's aversion to moving, especially after a major
disaster, boggles my mind."

But where do you go to be safe from disasters?

California - earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, torrential rains, rip
currents, and even volcanoes

Gulf Coast - hurricanes

Midwest - tornadoes

etc.

Slate Magazine set out to find where you could live free of potential
disasters. See:

"Where To Hide From Mother Nature"

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/200...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/2005/09/where_to_hide_from_mother_nature.html)

Their conclusion:

"Slate's "America's Best Place to Avoid Death Due to Natural Disaster": the
area in and around Storrs, Conn., home to the University of Connecticut..."

Read the article to see if you're ready to make the move.

~~~
JshWright
> etc.

You can't just name three places in a very large country and then say 'etc'.

There are plenty of places with much lower risks of natural disasters. That's
a big part of the reason my family lives in central New York.

~~~
herewulf
Upstate New York has some pretty terrible flooding. I don't know where you
consider "central New York" (it is -- after all -- a large state). The
corridor along I-86 (Elmira, Corning, Hornell, etc), where I lived for a few
years, has built up extensive flood controls to prevent future damage. A
lesson hard learned from multiple severe floods. Then there was bad flooding
just a few years ago in the Mohawk River valley centered around Herkimer.

Probably just the tip of the iceberg in a state that sees a lot of annual
rainfall.

~~~
JshWright
That's an easily solved problem though... don't buy a house in a floodplain...

I live in the hills southeast of Syracuse.

------
saryant
I've been in a number of major natural disasters at this point. Fukushima,
Ike, Colorado's 2013 floods. I've also been in two shooting incidents (where
fortunately only the shooter was hurt). My point is, I've been lucky so far
because none of these posed a major problem for me. I made it out with
manageable inconvenience.

However, I can only get lucky like that so many times.

So now I keep the following at home:

* 5 gallons drinking water

* Canned food for a week

* First aid kit

* Matches, lighter, Sterno cans

* Solar USB charger

* Many flashlights with spare batteries, plus a battery-powered lantern

* Hand-crank radio

* Solid liquor collection ;)

* Equipment to make a fresh cup of coffee with no electricity (Sterno, hand-crank coffee grinder, French press)

* A big bucket for, well, sanitation

I've also got my camping supplies, which includes a Coleman stove and a few
small propane canisters. Having been in a few floods I will also never live in
a ground-floor apartment. I also keep all this stuff boxed up in plastic
crates, so if I needed to evacuate I could load up my car with all this gear
in about 20 minutes and be on my way. My goal is to be able to survive a week
trapped in my apartment with no utilities, or living out of my car for the
same amount of time.

I bike to work and in my pannier I keep a Leatherman multitool, pocket knife,
latex gloves (mostly for fixing my bike chain, but also useful in other
emergencies), 3M N99 mask, flashlight, poncho, a garbage bag and a small thing
of duct tape. In most of the kinds of disasters that hit Colorado, I would be
able to get home, either walking or by bike. I only live about three miles
from work.

~~~
BatFastard
That will get you thru a week. But a week will get you thru everything but
society collapsing, and if it does collapse I am not sure I want to continue.

~~~
fapjacks
Actually, having toured various places where society has collapsed, it's
actually not as bad as people imagine. Some people live their entire lives in
collapsed societies. There is sometimes still electricity, food, water,
security, and sometimes even phone service, depending. And after many years of
study, I'd even say that those "collapsed societies" are actually more like
most human communities of the past. It seems to be a kind of natural state of
human civilization. We're just living in some damned lucky times.

------
thomas_howland
A 10 AM Bay Area earthquake is the highest plausibility * severity event
you're likely to experience around here on a day to day basis - leaving some
people with a 25 mile commute back to a structure that might or might not be
standing, intermittent at best communications, and potentially impassible
roads.

IMO if you don't have a case of water, a road map, and a change of walking-
around clothes in your car around here, you're asking for smiting. Fortunately
that's about $10 in total, and you can drink the water even if there's not an
earthquake.

Additionally, near everything that would be handy in case of an earthquake
(gloves, pry bar, basic trauma supplies, etc) is useful in case of a car
crash, which actually is far more likely.

~~~
Waterluvian
Your comment got me thinking about some form of volunteer force of medics.
Imagine if every 20th car that drove by had a government issued medical bag in
the trunk and a driver guaranteed to have recent first aid and emergency
training. And in return the driver gets some sort of tax break, or an HOV lane
free pass, or whatever the appropriate incentive is. Surely some country has
tried this out.

~~~
adrianN
Aren't first aid kits mandatory in cars in the US and don't you have to get
first aid training as part of your driver's licence?

~~~
saryant
No. Even a _driving test_ isn't necessarily required to get a driver's
license. I never took one.

~~~
Jtsummers
That depends on your state. I took one for my first license but haven't had a
driving test since when I've moved between states. I have had paper and oral
exams since then, though. But that only shows I know the laws and rules of
traffic, not the ability to drive.

------
aedron
The 'prepping' phenomenon is an expression of the extreme individualism (or
less graciously, ego-centrism) of our time and society. Rather than assuming
that society will come together in a crisis and help each other out, we need
to become an army-of-one, stocked up for every scenario and armed to the teeth
against dangerous others who are undoubtedly coming to take our shit. It's
sad.

I honestly think this another example of the huge class divide in America
causing such a negative outlook on other people, similar to how slave owners
lived in comfort, but also constant paranoia. Perhaps we should work on
improving conditions for the bottom of society, so we can have an expectation
of helping each other when the shit goes down.

~~~
jemfinch
What you call "extreme individualism" or "ego-centrism", we used to call
"self-reliance".

~~~
kerbalspacepro
Self-reliance is a myth made by conservatives to justify cutbacks to the poor.
Nobody in history has been entirely "self-reliant". Even the pioneers of the
Americas had an entire support network in the east and for those that lived
around them.

If they didn't, they died.

~~~
QAkICoU7IDNkpFu
A conspiracy, if you will... :'D

But seriously, you seem to imply it's bad that people plan ahead, for when
shit hits the fan, and somehow those people are the bad guys? Maybe that's not
what you intended, but it's what you seem to imply.

------
the_prepared
I'm an exited valley founder who just launched an emergency preparedness site
for the rational crowd: [https://theprepared.com](https://theprepared.com)

Have been prepping in the SF / startup community for almost 10 years and
teaching other techies how to prep for a long time, but historically was face
to face because of stigma, etc.

We started The Prepared because prepping is very rational and it's gone
mainstream enough to have threads like this on HN.

Beginners checklist here: [https://theprepared.com/guides/emergency-
preparedness-checkl...](https://theprepared.com/guides/emergency-preparedness-
checklist-prepping-beginners/)

Post on reasons why liberals should be preppers:
[https://theprepared.com/blog/five-reasons-why-liberals-
shoul...](https://theprepared.com/blog/five-reasons-why-liberals-should-be-
preppers/)

Happy to help anyone in their journey.

(long time personal HN members but this is a new account)

~~~
agentdrtran
That site seems great but it's still a tough sell when the "welcome to
rational prepping" guide includes AI and CRISPR as causes.

~~~
jorazzle
Why? Elon just said AI is a bigger threat than North Korea.

~~~
throwanem
Elon says a lot of things!

~~~
jrockway
Maybe he's just talking about _his_ AIs when they're near bright white trucks
on sunny days.

------
dankohn1
I love this sentence from the piece: "In the 90s, it seemed that you couldn't
go wrong by getting into professional journalism, opening a video rental store
or an arcade, or selling calculators, encyclopedias, disposable cameras,
answering machines, and audio CDs."

~~~
nebabyte
I mean it's not like all of those people died

------
pjc50
To me, the #1 marker of "crazy" in disaster preparation is a focus on violence
against your fellow civilians, and I'm glad that this guide pushes that out
into the far end of unlikely and extreme end of scenarios.

For what this scenario actually looks like, a post on Metafilter about
Sarajevo: [http://www.metafilter.com/78669/What-if-things-just-keep-
get...](http://www.metafilter.com/78669/What-if-things-just-keep-getting-
worse#2430771)

~~~
Gustomaximus
From reading forums the other marker seems to be those 'who know' what they
are prepping for e.g a solar flair or nuclear bomb is going to happen. This
vs. the attitude disasters can happen and to have general coverage.

And if you look at the history of the world it's reasonable to have some level
of prep going. Disasters are low chance but consequences are severe. It's
reasonable odds at one point in your life there will be a major disaster.
Historically it's unlikely to get through 2 lifetimes without something
significant happening. Most people have house/car insurance for these low risk
events but feel prepping is unusual. I'd prefer to have some coverage from a
low chance but high consequences disaster than have the cost of replacing a
car covered.

------
weisser
The context sections of this article are super helpful. I've recently become
acquainted with this subject matter. Doing a quick audit of my lifestyle I
realize how unprepared I actually am. I think this speaks to the safety I've
felt growing up.

I've been following this guide: [https://theprepared.com/guides/emergency-
preparedness-checkl...](https://theprepared.com/guides/emergency-preparedness-
checklist-prepping-beginners/)

I really need to take the time to go through and thoroughly cross-reference
these two resources.

------
f_allwein
interesting book that takes a similar angle: ‘The Knowledge: How to Rebuild
our World from Scratch’ [http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/](http://the-
knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/)

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
Came in here to post the same thing! Read it a few years back and thought it
was superb. Found out there were tons of gaps in my knowledge.

------
pmx
Is there a plugin that makes websites like this easier to read on modern
devices? The lines of text here are too long for my poor brain to parse but I
don't want to have to resize my browser for each badly designed website.

~~~
azdle
I just use a simple bookmarklet that I label 'Make Narrow':

javascript:(function(){var%20b=document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];b.style.maxWidth='50em';b.style.marginLeft='auto';b.style.marginRight='auto';})()

Just manually create a new bookmark and put that as the URL, then when you
click it, it runs that snippet and make the body have a max-width of 50em.

~~~
FooHentai
Ooh handy, thanks. I'll put this alongside the incredibly useful 'Kill Sticky'
bookmarklet that kills overlays.

------
dmix
> It's not that life-altering disasters are rare: every year we hear about
> millions of people displaced by wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, or
> floods.

Pretty much always in the sames typical places though...

See: 'tornado alley', island nations with tsunami seasons, california
wildfires, etc, etc (over a long enough timespan)...

> Heck, not a decade goes by without at least one first-class democracy
> lapsing into armed conflict or fiscal disarray.

Ditto

See: countries with a perpetual history of dictators and authoritarianism
(although westerners and capitalism/socialism typically receive the blame in
popular depictions)

~~~
f-
[Author here]

> [...natural disasters...] Pretty much always in the sames typical places
> though...

Most people live in "typical places" without realizing it, though. I mean, you
know when you're in the tornado valley, but tornado / hurricane risk is
relatively high for basically the entire eastern half of the US. And wildfire
risk is very significant for the entire western half. Add to this earthquakes,
etc, and it turns out that most people live in a place that is likely to
experience a major regional disaster every couple decades or so.

Still, the guide is not really about that; or rather, it covers natural
disasters to some extent, but it puts a lot more emphasis on personal
preparedness - being able to cope with another run-of-the-mill recession, a
house fire, and other likely occurrences of this sort. More general
preparedness is almost a side effect of that.

> [...economic crises and armed conflicts...] Ditto. See: countries with a
> perpetual history of dictators and authoritarianism (although westerners and
> capitalism/socialism typically receive the blame in popular depictions)

Well... Greece, Iceland, etc?

~~~
pjc50
Greece certainly has a history of political instability (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_military_junta_of_1967%E...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_military_junta_of_1967%E2%80%9374)
) but Iceland was a straightforward economic crisis - Kaupthing discovered how
profitable leverage was and just kept going because there was nobody to tell
them to stop, until the whole thing blew up. I don't remember hearing this
translate into political instability, I think Iceland is too small a country
for that.

------
legulere
> first-class democracy lapsing into armed conflict

I can come up with none

> Throughout much of the recorded history, the monetary systems of the western
> world employed so-called commodity money, generally settling on coins minted
> out of silver or gold.

This is false. Silver and gold coinage was largely restricted to international
trade, transactions were mostly done by keeping tabs. Gold and Silver coins
developed most likely as you can easily produce them to share the spoils of
war with soldiers. The important property of Gold and Silver is that you can
easily steal it. See Debt the first 5000 years
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years))

> Biking on public roads? Wear a helmet

Head injuries are way more common in cars than on bicycles. Wearing a helmet
while driving a car has a bigger benefit.

------
bluGill
One that that needs to be emphasized is you only perfect preparation for about
2 weeks of the worst case, after that you need must less.

Lose your job for 6 months, cut your budget and use your emergency savings,
but most of your supplies are not used (tap water is still safe to drink).

Complete collapse of civilization? 2 weeks to enough to understand how bad it
is - when the power isn't coming back that implies such a reduced population
that you don't worry about looting: in fact you should be with the few
remaining people looting what there is. Break into WalMart for clothing. If
you live in an area where you cannot support yourself farming break into a
dealer's safe, get the keys to a new truck, and break into gas stations tanks
along the way to fill it up until you get someplace you can survive long term.
(the truck will be abandoned once you are there: fuel goes bad quickly).

On those lines, you don't need to move to a rural area and practice survival
skills now. All those massive corporate farms: at best they have enough fuel
to get in half the harvest so they need your manual labor now. Get out of the
city and you will find rural areas with plenty of food in desperate need of
labor. Almost nobody knows how to harvest corn by hand. Few people know how to
use a horse. they need your help to figure it out. Make yourself more valuable
by bringing seeds for vegetables that are not in the fields.

------
norea-armozel
I always feel that part of the reason why disasters hit us so hard is the fact
that despite having some built in resilience in the current system we have
it's not resilient on the small scale (i.e. the individual). If SHTF as an
individual you're boned, but if you're a corporation or some other kind of
organization you can weather it. It just seems to me that a whole new way of
handling shocks to society needs to account for this fact more so than ever.
The attempt by some to abolish the social safety net is just one of many
things that our species is doing wrong. We need less efficiency and more
redundancy. We need less profitability and more sustainability. Basically, we
need to add resilience to the system down to the individual level where it's
practical.

------
daveheq
Less crazy folk? I can't tell you many "less crazy folk" believe the most
nutso easily-disprovable bunk on the internet because it reinforces their
feelings and beliefs on something... Completely functional people making great
money or running successful businesses or raising great kids, just totally
believing whatever bunk makes them feel good. It's not about "crazy", it's
about people just not being willing to investigate something further than what
they believe, and trying to convince them of the "less crazy" way just won't
budge them if they don't want to budge.

------
pbarnes_1
What's the point of living through the zombie apocalypse?

I honestly don't understand any of this stuff vs the normal 3 days of
water/food/etc thing. If shit's that bad, we might as well be dead. Why live
for The Walking Dead?

~~~
mmagin
Like most philosophical questions, there's no one easy answer. Furthermore,
there are plenty of sub-zombie-apocalypse situations for which you might again
get back to something resembling normal life. Consider for example any of the
genocides of the past century.

------
fallingfrog
I think placing thermonuclear war in the "Zombie Apocalypse" category is
probably wrong; it should go into category #2. JFK estimated after the cuban
missile crisis that the chances that could have developed into a full-blown
nuclear exchange were about 1 in 3. Not terribly long odds. Given the current
political situation the probability is much lower- but political situations
change, and the weapons are still here. The real risk is impossible to know,
but unlike zombies, nuclear weapons are real, and they have been used on
civilians once already.

~~~
saalweachter
It's fair to note it as the most probable of the "Zombie Apocalypse" category,
but "impossible" isn't the common theme of that category, it's "civilization
ending".

Under all of the scenarios in Problem Space #3, the world is irrevocably
changed and there is not necessarily any reason to think it will go back to
the way thing are now in the survivors' lifetimes. In the other two problem
spaces, you are looking at perhaps-widespread but finite disruptions. Maybe an
entire country or region of a large country is hosed for years or decades, but
you can either expect things to go back to normal eventually, or you can
migrate to somewhere where things are normal. With either a zombie apocalypse
or a nuclear one, you don't have that expectation, and whatever you do to
prepare for that situation will be largely the same.

------
androck1
This reads like a practical guide to being an adult. Incredibly valuable.

------
unlmtd1
An all out thermonuclear war would be the end of the human race. Thankfully,
it won't happen simply because thermonuclear warfare is now obsolete. An all-
out electromagnetic nuclear war is its successor, which would only spell the
end of our civilization. But chances are we just devolve into civil wars
breaking out and a few viruses. Our base case is a 25-33% fall in population
in one generation. Bottled water won't help. Large rain water collection
systems are a lot more likely to give a survival chance.

------
notadoc
Is it just perception or is 'prepping' becoming mainstreamed?

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Of course it's becoming mainstream. Quality of life for most people has been
declining in America for a while. Trust in our government is at an all-time
low. Most people don't have _any_ friends, let alone a sense of community.
Much of the country is _still_ recovering from the economic crisis, even
though the stock market has fully recovered. An unexpected illness can
bankrupt most families in the country. Social mobility is going down every
year, and it's basically a requirement to be in the top 20% of performers to
be able to live comfortably. Political partisanship is higher than ever. Old
forms of media have been recently exposed as rigged and controlled by the
rich, and the new forms of media online provide so much input, most people
can't emotionally adjust.

With an increasing anxiety on the state of the nation and a decrease in
security for most people and their families, it's only natural that prepping
would become mainstream.

------
geff82
I love this article, because in its essence, it does not prepare you for
prepping as much as leading a solid life.

It is also one of the first articles about prepping with a positive tone. I
personally do some mild prepping (as my mother always did herself). But I
don't like to be associated with the "typical" preppers and stay clear of
them, because prepping is no lifestyle that leads anywhere. I think prepping
should be a side topic - to keep your good life good in case an anomaly
happens.

------
cairo_x
Get obese and buy a bunch of electrolytes and water. You'll be good for a
whole year without food, provided you keep those electrolytes in check, no
problem. #FACT

------
bla2
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906232)

------
cerealbad
reminds me of the back-to-the-land movement and the foxfire books. their
impetus in the 60s and 70s was a retreat from the complicated,
(inter)dependent, technological ecosystem of a modern metropolis; towards a
simpler redundancy structured around puritan hard work, self-sufficiency and
independence of the farm and barter village. james burke had an excellent tv
show in 1978 called "connections" covering science and technology (episode 1
linked). the follow up series in later decades were not as good:

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp)

it began by unwinding civilisation should a critical failure in a complex
system lead to catastrophic and cascading collapse; then later trying to
understand the connective steps taken from ancient pre-history to then present
day.

most well-educated people lack the physical endurance, manual dexterity,
strength and mental fortitude to revert back to pre-20th century agrarian
survival. as we belong to a society of atomized individual consumers who
receive instant gratification from novelty products which require little
skill, patience or forethought to use. we depend mostly on mental faculties
and the mechanical advantage of machines, with atrophied social and physical
abilities. how many jokes, poems, stories or songs do you know? how many hours
can you do hard physical labour for? professional sports and fitness
industries artificially fill this void.

nobody can sell the things you actually need. the simplest short-term way to
survive a disaster is to introduce yourself to your neighbours. depend on each
other and share resources, car pool, grow food, recycle rainwater, repair
broken things. you now have a backup network to the unavailable local, state,
federal and international resources otherwise marshalled to aid you in time of
need.

i will conclude my boring cliched opinions with this: i don't believe a
disaster you need to prepare for is coming, nor am i convinced any preparation
even on a whole city scale would be sufficient. should transportation and grid
networks collapse indefinitely, you will likely die. if you live in a place
prone to flooding, own a boat. if you live in a place with bush or forest
fires, leave you homes when instructed. if you live along earthquake fault
lines, avoid old buildings. if you live in a place with high crime, legally
carry a weapon to defend yourself.sense became uncommon in a world without
commons. if you care for my advice, i suggest you learn play an instrument and
develop your singing voice, as the oldest ongoing human activity you are
guaranteed job security even during ragnarok.

------
aedron
What is the safer place in a 'doomsday' scenario - the city or the country-
side?

~~~
eighthnate
The countryside. It's where the food is. Imagine if all
transportation/energy/etc were destroyed. Imagine NYC or LA completely dark
and with no food coming in. Millions of people without food, without light,
etc within city limits. It would get very dangerous, very quick. Nevermind the
garbage piling up, nonexistent sanitation, etc.

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rubatuga
Been looking into getting a pocket knife/ multitool, any good options?

~~~
omegant
For multitool you can not go wrong with a leatherman wave. Great warranty too,
they'll fix anything you break.

Not big but not really for pocket carry though.

For fixed multiuse blade (think bushcraft, not defense) I don't buy any other
than Mora. Really cheap, like 20-30$. I give them as a present to friends when
I go for a walk and notice they don't have any. They are made of great steel
and keep the edge well. They are great knives with the price of dispossable
ones so you are not afraid of actually using them.

I'm kind of afraid of really punishing a $150 knive, so they end as box queens
at home..

~~~
Gustomaximus
If you not that price sensitive consider Leatherman Charge. Slightly better
than the Wave. Its not cheap but they should last a long time. It my go to
tool for little fix it jobs around the house. Amazing quality and coverage
what you get done with it.

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Fiahil
Pocketed that link under the "Apocalypse" tag. Thanks !

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novaleaf
anyone have good book recommendations? specifically looking for wilderness
survival, first aid, and edible plants (pacific northwest)

~~~
the_prepared
I carry the SAS pocket guide: [https://goo.gl/hnDJm7](https://goo.gl/hnDJm7)

~~~
novaleaf
thanks, the 3rd edition is still cheap :)

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computator
It's great to see HTTPS being adopted everywhere: even a Polish guy's personal
blog on a Christmas Island (.cx) domain is encrypted. That's what I thought
until I realized that I was looking at the favicon. He's not using HTTPS. He's
using a lock symbol as his favicon and that alone was enough to throw me off.

The browser vendors keep gratuitously changing the shape, color, and position
of the lock icon, so a lock symbol anywhere in the browser edges is enough to
fool most of us.

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beebmam
How about we plan on not having a doomsday in the first place?

Why are nuclear weapons not banned? Chemical/biological weapons are. Let's end
nuclear weapons too, and take this world back from the possibility of
doomsday.

~~~
unlmtd1
Nuclear power is the root cause of nuclear weapons.

~~~
pdfernhout
Unrecognized irony is the root cause of nuclear weapons -- since what is the
point of fighting over oil fields or farmland or other resources with nuclear
weapons when you have advanced materials and advanced computing and advanced
energy sources that could produce abundance for everyone?

