I don't know. It seems to me like we keep getting better at making the system more resilient. Disasters seem to be less problematic now than when I was a child. Even regional disasters get aid brought in on a scale that simply wasn't possible when I was a child.
As an adult, I've witnessed disasters routinely get remedied quicker, better etc than predicted. And we are incredibly meh about it.
Y2K was supposed to be a global financial disaster. It gets remembered like "Ha! Can you imagine those dummies stocked their basements with 5 years of flour like this was supposed to be a disaster?!"
When Iraq set Kuwaiti oil wells on fire, it was predicted that they would burn for years and be a global environmental disaster. Instead, crack teams from around the world converged on the country and invented new techniques to resolve it. They were all out in six months, with essentially no fanfare for this miracle.
Afterwards, the desert bloomed from the combination of fertilizer (soot from the fires) and water (from putting them out) like no one had seen in twenty years. That was also given no fanfare.
I'm in no position to do disaster prep. My life is an ongoing disaster and crisis management is all I can arrange for myself currently. But I also mostly just don't really see unmitigated disasters in the news of the sort that were the norm in my childhood.
Instead, I often see "Disaster In The News! Prediction: 200k Will Die!!!" Follow up: "200 people died. Meh. On to more exciting News."
Many of the Arab countries are now in a state of permanent disaster. Something like three million refugees are now spread across Turkey and Europe. 200k dead there won't even make the news.
Not something that stockpiling food in the basement would have helped with.
Across the Atlantic, Puerto Rico is in a disaster state again, and the flow of refugees is from Honduras and Guatemala. Part of the news response is complaining that not enough of them are dying on the way.
Puerto Rico crossed my mind after I posted. Also, fires in California, a state I left a bit over two years ago.
So I'm aware there are terrible things that go on in the world that no one really does anything about. I was openly homeless for years. No one did any fundraisers to rescue me and I continue to see comments on HN that basically dismiss homelessness in the US as "just a bunch of junkies and crazies, not a systemic issue."
I guess I'm more wondering out loud how much it matters to me personally to do this kind of prep as an American who is no longer in California. The world currently seems to divide up between disasters that do get mitigated handily and those where, as you say, some provisions in your basement wouldn't have protected you.
As noted above, I'm in no position to do disaster prep currently for myself. I still live hand to mouth.
Yet, I participate in community meetings and try to help make the area I'm in better in some ways.
I do wish the US had more humane policies for dealing with refugees from Central and South America. I hate what little I read about that stuff.
But I don't tend to comment on it because I don't really have a solution and I imagine a real solution would involve interceding at the source -- ie sending some kind of aid to the countries these refugees are coming from. I don't imagine that would go over well. I imagine that would get mocked a la "Don't piss off the US or they will bring freedom to you, too."
Middle of the night half-baked thought kind of wondering how much it matters to me that I can't currently do this kind of disaster prep. Is it just one more thing I should be helplessly wringing my hands about and feeling sorry for myself over? Or is it sufficient that I do what I can to try to be a resource for my community for issues like homelessness?
My mother grew up in Germany during WW2 and it's aftermath. She never say still. She was constantly doing something. She only watched TV while ironing.
A lot of what she did involved helping people around her to make their lives work better. I think she understood something many Americans don't about how civilized life can come apart at the seams overnight and she invested her time and energy in saying "Not on my watch, it won't."
I think that's basically where I'm at mentally as well. I participate in public meetings locally and develop homeless resources online, etc, even though I am frequently broke because those are things I can do much more effectively than I can earn an adequate living for myself. Though an adequate living is probably around the corner, so hopefully I will keep investing in fostering civility as an antidote or prophylactic to disaster without continuing to live with ongoing personal crisis myself.
When I was living hand to mouth, I found that having some food stored up in my house was a big help with spending less on food: I succumbed less often to the temptation to buy convenience food, I could spend less time traveling to buy groceries, and I could buy what was on sale and buy in bulk, thus decreasing my costs. If there's any way you can trim your food budget by 5%, you can use those savings to build up a one-week stockpile in the next six months.
But maybe my endpoint was your starting point, since you were trained by your mother, and maybe you're already a black-belt tightwad I'm foolishly mansplaining to. But hopefully my comment will be useful to someone.
Living hand to rent is in my experience more difficult, and of course there's not that much food you can stock up in a tent on the King Street sidewalk.
The food situation is complicated by medical stuff that significantly impacts dietary choices. That's not something I know how to succinctly explain. Suffice it to say that what may look like "foolish, expensive" food choices for a poor person are often the dirt cheap answer, healthwise.
I was homeless for nearly six years. I got into a room initially where cooking wasn't going to work and then we moved to a room last summer where cooking a bit does work, but the fridge died our second day here.
So for over a year, we had a fridge but no means to cook and then for several months now we've had the means to cook but no fridge. This meant that whether we got takeout or cooked, food had to be purchased just prior to having a meal.
I'm trying to be philosophical about the whole thing and view it as An Experience, among other things.
When the tax refund gets here, we plan to upgrade to a larger George Foreman grill (our limited means to cook is a too small grill) and buy a working fridge. That should make the logistics of my life work substantially better, including making it possible to do a little stocking up, and start easing some of the financial pressure.
Yeah, everyone's circumstances are different, and it's hard to tell from the outside. Are you on a meat-only diet?
I sort of also don't have a fridge at the moment, as it happens. The things I've found store most easily are small pieces of dried plants: mung beans, rice, yerba mate, flour, peanuts, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, texturized vegetable protein, sugar, dry minced garlic, dried onion flakes, black-eyed peas, tiny noodles, polenta, that kind of thing. I usually store them in cleaned plastic coke bottles, which are beetle-proof but not mouse-proof; details are in Dercuano if you're interested. Storing meat is considerably dodgier, since without refrigeration, it pretty much has to be canned (heavy and expensive) unless you preserve it with really aggressive chemicals, like traditional hams and sausages. Yogurt-making can sometimes help both to stretch milk out for longer and to help with certain medical stuff, like lactose intolerance and some intestinal microbiome problems. But maybe not your medical stuff, since I have no idea what it is.
For people who can eat them, fresh fruit and vegetables are often much cheaper and healthier than other options, but you have to really keep on top of them if you or your neighbors are sensitive to decay. It doesn't take long for a perfectly delicious orange to turn into a fly-breeding ball of mold, especially in a hot climate.
In case somebody else reading this is facing the "no stove" problem, well, the apartment where I woke up today had the gas cut off for a while, so a few times I cooked dinner here on a "penny stove" built to Mark Jurey's design. It's fiddly, and the smell of partly burned alcohol is unappetizing, but it's easy to improvise from garbage in any urban area. You can use it if you can get liquid fuel and if you aren't at too much risk of burning down the house or being kicked out of it for trying to cook. It can run on alcohol, which is a pretty low-risk liquid fuel, since it's nontoxic and you can put out alcohol fires with just water. Butane stoves that run off butane cylinders can also be an option, but storing butane cylinders indoors makes me nervous. And truck stops still sell dirt-cheap immersion electrical heaters with which you can boil a cup, a bowl, a thermos, or a pot of water without any fire, at least, if you remember to unplug the heater before you take it out of the water. They do pose a nonzero risk of serious electrical shock. Electric teakettles can be a safer and more convenient way to do a subset of this; for example, at the moment, I'm munching on a bowl of Maruchan ramen cooked by pouring boiling water onto it from an electric teakettle, then soaking for a few minutes under aluminum foil.
Ziploc omelets are a very-low-effort and tasty way to leverage a boiling pot or even bowl of water into a reasonable simulation of grilled eggs: eggs, cheese, maybe some vegetables, and seasonings in a sealed ziploc bag cooks the eggs quite nicely into a reasonable simulacrum of an omelet. (Moreover, it's sterile, though I wouldn't count on that for long.) The company recommends against it, saying the plastic may not be safe for food contact at high temperatures.
Just to repeat, these are things that have worked for me, and they aren't guaranteed to work for anybody else, but it might be valuable information to somebody.
> I'm trying to be philosophical about the whole thing and view it as An Experience, among other things.
You're not dead yet, which is more than I can say for many of my friends. Every day you're still alive is a victory!
As an adult, I've witnessed disasters routinely get remedied quicker, better etc than predicted. And we are incredibly meh about it.
Y2K was supposed to be a global financial disaster. It gets remembered like "Ha! Can you imagine those dummies stocked their basements with 5 years of flour like this was supposed to be a disaster?!"
When Iraq set Kuwaiti oil wells on fire, it was predicted that they would burn for years and be a global environmental disaster. Instead, crack teams from around the world converged on the country and invented new techniques to resolve it. They were all out in six months, with essentially no fanfare for this miracle.
Afterwards, the desert bloomed from the combination of fertilizer (soot from the fires) and water (from putting them out) like no one had seen in twenty years. That was also given no fanfare.
I'm in no position to do disaster prep. My life is an ongoing disaster and crisis management is all I can arrange for myself currently. But I also mostly just don't really see unmitigated disasters in the news of the sort that were the norm in my childhood.
Instead, I often see "Disaster In The News! Prediction: 200k Will Die!!!" Follow up: "200 people died. Meh. On to more exciting News."