For finance, I find interesting the other way around. You see many fire types preparing TOO MUCH. Obviously you should not live paycheck to paycheck. But if you prepare for a 3% return fire, wasting years, your chance of dying early is the much bigger worry than running out of money.

Well, don't leave us hanging. What did they say?

Cool new toys! I like it. I've recently been thinking of branching into more water sports such as rowing, ocean swimming and the like to have a better shot at surviving out at sea. Hopefully I've gotten some mountains covered by now.

i've not read the book, but i've thought about this on and off for a while.

the common trope of a mad max style wasteland where there are roaming barbarians and everyone is in a state of disorganized chaos is imo overstated. a hobbesian fantasy/wet dream.

humans tend to be self organizing and (mostly) altruistic in the face of disaster. we have plenty examples of this: fukishima, the boston bombing, ongoing ukrainian conflict, syrian conflict.

that's not to say that scoundrels do not exist. times of chaos create space for predators to take advantage of people. it happens more frequently at greater scale. there will be plenty of untethered folks with some form of military training.

similarly, the idea that you could simply ride out a long term disaster in a prepper cave is (again coached in an imho) mostly a fantasy. most people simply need community to survive.

fear of warlord run gangs shouldn't dissuade you from having a small stockpile of goods to survive. if they exist, and you meet they'll probably chop your head off regardless.

the most sensible thing to do is prepare within reason and build a community of people around you that can rely on you and vice verse.

That's one of the issues with these if you ask me.

Either you're a hermit, that really can build that hermit cave in the mountains, far off and all the guns they're stockpiling won't really be used.

Or you're way too close to civilization coz you have an actual family and they'd never do / care about any of that "crazy stuff".

And if you're that close to civilization, it's all about who's got the larger stockpile and larger amount of armed thugs. Are you really gonna fight off 30 guys with AR-15s with a family of four, two of which are children to protect your stash of food and gas and generator(s)?

The only way your "prepping alone" is gonna help you is the hermit case, far far out of sight or if it's "not all that bad anyway".

But be prepared for the society you live in to vote for an obviously, significantly destabilising leader...

Some societies can be stable for a while, but all of them eventually become unstable, collapse, and make room for new ones.

Care to name any examples?

Stable societies fundamentally require increasingly large energy inputs. What we're seeing happening right now, in a large part, is due to a system whose complexity has exceed the available energy required to sustain it.

The idea that what we're seeing is because "too many people voted for the wrong guy" fails to recognize the larger condition for which all of this is merely emergent phenomena. We no longer have the resources to sustain the society we life in so it begins to uncomfortably revert to lower energy states in ways we haven't seen in a long time.

One of those things that I have trouble mentally placing in the correct time period is the standardization of the cartridges that we still use today. When they were developed, tractors were still using metal tires and blood type testing for transfusions didn't exist yet. Living on the West coast usually meant that you had to be self sufficient. Some of my ancestors at the time lived in Idaho in a hole they dug in the ground, that they put a roof over. They had another similar dugout that they filled with ice blocks during the winter, to sell in the summer for some income. Most of them were sustenance farmers. One of my great grandparents had multiple acres in Van Nuys to grow enough food and raise enough rabbits to live off of. That land would be worth millions now, but back then it was what you needed to get by. Being rich would mean you had nicer clothes and a bigger house and servants and didn't have to grow your own food, but even the rich rarely had electric power, and when they did it was only routed to lamp sockets.

Do many people think that with their single assault rifle or other weap9n, that they would successfully defend against one or more truckloads of vandals looking to steal whatever they have stored up "self-sufficiently"? History seems to indicate that in the absence of law, those with the most people inside a fortified structure and position are the most likely to survive.