Various Thoughts on Preparedness

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First I reject the idea that you can only be prepared by taking super drastic life changing measures. I suppose what is drastic and life changing is relative though. If you live in NYC/ LA/ Chicago and have never shot, and certainly don’t own a gun you might need to make some big changes. However for most people reading this; who probably live in a mid sized town or the burbs but not right in the middle of a major urban center and do own guns, you can get really prepared with minimal changes to your overall life.

Of course it depends on what you are preparing for. Being really blunt a lot of people are not preparing for realistic scenarios, they are preparing for survivalist doomer porn fantasies. The doomer porn fantasies they are preparing for happen to justify all of their decisions as being brilliant.

You should choose a lifestyle and area based on how you (and your family) want to live not on what some survivalist ‘expert’ says. By all means move to the hinterboonies to raise animals and grow a big garden, just do it because you want to!

Shaping your life based on the risk of a scenario that is to be blunt very unlikely is foolish.

The concept of diminishing returns is something we need to consider in preparedness and its camo wearing, maybe angry and racist, cousin surivalism. The way diminishing returns work is that essentially at some point you start getting less payoff for the investment. Often the initial payoff is really high in an area. At some point it drops considerably.

Put it like this. You decide to buy the wife/ GF/ whatever some flowers for no particular reason. For $20 you get a nice little bouquet in a color she likes at the grocery store. The wife/ GF/ whatever is happy. Say you order a $200 bouquet from a florist.  The $200 bouquet is probably not going to get you a woman who is 10x happier than the $20 flowers.

Preparedness is sort of like that.

Lets say a person sees some risks and decides to get prepared. They get a couple weeks of shelf stable ready to eat (crackers, peanut butter, canned soup, poptarts, etc), a couple water jugs and a filter, a few boxes of batteries for their flashlights and some extra ammo for whatever guns they have. They take $1,000 cash out of savings and keep it at home. This person is now prepared for the vast majority, say 80% of events.

Say they take it a bit further, push the food to 2 months. Buy a military pattern rifle and a case of ammo. A generator for when the power goes out. Put a bit of money into silver. Get some bug out stuff together. Now they are ready for like 90% of events. Rough math says we are at a few thousand dollars here.

Getting ready for the other 10% of events is going to be a lot more expensive. It is also going to have significantly more impact on your normal life. The really funny part is that for the other 10% of events the preparations people are making are generally for the wrong thing.

When war/ pestilence, etc come to your area GO SOMEWHERE ELSE! You don’t need to be buying pallets of surplus razor wire, you need to make sure that your passports are current.