There Are Those Who Call Me... Tim - Member - The Prepared

Discussions

Reply to: How to think about, protect against, and survive an EMP attack Posted August 27, 2023

Man, is it just me or is this the solar EMP thing the most terrifying/depressing thing on this site? The likelihood x severity x duration product of pretty much all the other prep scenarios seem to me moderate. Nuclear war is a basically permanent world-ender but seems to me a very unlikely event (it depends on people doing a really obviously crazy thing with immediate consequences and while I don’t want to be complacent….) Meanwhile a flood is maybe super likely but ultimately a temporary, localized and not catastrophic event. That kind of thing. Most of the things we deal with on this site are catastrophic or inevitable, but not both. (I know, I know, climate change.) But when you start talking about a thing whose probability makes it a “hundred-year event” or even a “thirty-three year event” (I know, 1% chance in a year doesn’t mean it will happen every hundred years, but that’s the language engineers and others use when describing such an event) AND whose consequences would be globally catastrophic with no recovery possible…. I don’t know how you prepare for something like that without devoting a significant part of your life to learning pre-industrial or at least 19th-century skill sets and radical self-sufficiency. I’ve overreacted in the past to things like peak oil and Y2K, so I’m aware of the tendency to catastrophize. But damn. This is heavy.

Reply to: [Official comment thread] Supermarket food list Posted August 27, 2023

On the brown rice thing…. just before the pandemic (for reasons having nothing to do with prep!) I loaded up on several big bags of brown rice. The bags were sealed plastic. Just over three years later (I’m writing this in June 2023) I’m eating the last of it. It’s still fine. I’m thinking the kind of bag makes a difference…. a lot of the big bags of rice you get, especially in the little ethnic grocery stores, are kind of meshy or at least porous bags that will probably store less well. I would prefer not to have to repackage anything–aside from being a lot of work, there’s always the question of something getting into it e.g. a bead of sweat dropping off my head if I’m doing it on a hot day, which happened once and ruined one of my bags.

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Reply to: How to think about, protect against, and survive an EMP attack Posted August 27, 2023

Man, is it just me or is this the solar EMP thing the most terrifying/depressing thing on this site? The likelihood x severity x duration product of pretty much all the other prep scenarios seem to me moderate. Nuclear war is a basically permanent world-ender but seems to me a very unlikely event (it depends on people doing a really obviously crazy thing with immediate consequences and while I don’t want to be complacent….) Meanwhile a flood is maybe super likely but ultimately a temporary, localized and not catastrophic event. That kind of thing. Most of the things we deal with on this site are catastrophic or inevitable, but not both. (I know, I know, climate change.) But when you start talking about a thing whose probability makes it a “hundred-year event” or even a “thirty-three year event” (I know, 1% chance in a year doesn’t mean it will happen every hundred years, but that’s the language engineers and others use when describing such an event) AND whose consequences would be globally catastrophic with no recovery possible…. I don’t know how you prepare for something like that without devoting a significant part of your life to learning pre-industrial or at least 19th-century skill sets and radical self-sufficiency. I’ve overreacted in the past to things like peak oil and Y2K, so I’m aware of the tendency to catastrophize. But damn. This is heavy.

Reply to: [Official comment thread] Supermarket food list Posted August 27, 2023

On the brown rice thing…. just before the pandemic (for reasons having nothing to do with prep!) I loaded up on several big bags of brown rice. The bags were sealed plastic. Just over three years later (I’m writing this in June 2023) I’m eating the last of it. It’s still fine. I’m thinking the kind of bag makes a difference…. a lot of the big bags of rice you get, especially in the little ethnic grocery stores, are kind of meshy or at least porous bags that will probably store less well. I would prefer not to have to repackage anything–aside from being a lot of work, there’s always the question of something getting into it e.g. a bead of sweat dropping off my head if I’m doing it on a hot day, which happened once and ruined one of my bags.