6 ms·

Germany is not as stable as we think. Just ask its preppers

20 points by helsinkiandrew 5y ago

coliveira 5y ago
If Germany is not stable because its preppers, imagine the USA....
haspoken 5y ago
https://archive.is/wzx3J https://archive.is/wzx3J
emodendroket 5y ago
Yes, someone is always convinced the end of the world is right around the corner.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
Germany is doubling down on bad decisions, they basically gave up on software and they are ready to give up on other high Tech. This is what a gambler looks like, when he believes to be on a "luck streak" and wants to recover from recent losses by betting the farm.
- kohlerm 5y ago
  With regards to Software, SAP is still german and runs the worlds biggest companies
  - kragen 5y ago
    Yeah, but people who use Haimer indicators or Audi cars constantly talk about how great they are, while people who use ABAP (SAP's flagship language) constantly talk about how shitty it is. SAP is not the Audi or even the Volkswagen of software; it's the Yugo. I'm curious why the grandparent thinks Germany is giving up on high tech. From afar Germany looks like a high-tech powerhouse, including in software. Ableton, Star Division, Revision (the demo party), and the Chaos Computer Club are much better exemplars of the German software scene than SAP.
curuinor 5y ago
How do you know that they didn't just watch a lot of American TV and YouTube and we didn't export our insanities into their heads?
- vermilingua 5y ago
  Even that aside, do we judge the health of the US based on the opinions of preppers? What an inane article.
  - godelski 5y ago
    Honestly? I think many people do. Maybe not specifically peppers but other fringe groups. Though sometimes we pretend fringe groups are far larger than they actually are for long enough that they stop being fringe.
- danjac 5y ago
  Given all that Germany went through the past century (albeit if much of that was self-inflicted), it's hardly surprising that "prepper culture" will find fertile ground.
  - andrew_eit 5y ago
    Actually, I would say that their history is an argument against the case that they are unstable. The fact that Germany had such a massive political and existential crisis that led them to war and genocide is still very much present in their memory. National pride is still something that is quite frowned upon (it would make people very uncomfortable say, if you walk around the street with a German flag and it's not clearly due to a football game). On the other hand, I would say countries that have not yet had any cultural or existential crisis in the last few hundred years as a nation are more at risk of collapse. Unless the country and culture is constantly changing and evolving and its population are similarly keen to routinely update the status quo, at some point it will fall out of sync with, people will get upset and wonder why things aren't like the good old days, find arbitrary reasons for this (identification of perpetrators and allocation of blame) and the upheaval will begin.
Proven 5y ago
They sit on a ton of IOUs from FPIIGs. Take that away and suddenly there's a lot less to spend. Governmental micromanagement and mismanagement is significant. Artificially inflated cost of energy has badly damaged the quality of life and the ECB is out of Germany's indirect control, ready to destroy whatever savings people have managed to put aside. If I lived in Germany I'd be a prepper, too. Of course, socialists (most responsible for the problems described above) think everyone can continue to live at another person's or country's expense ever after.
mulvya 5y ago
'Preppers', by definition, are those who have decided the world is unstable and on the brink of collapse. Their presence or opinion, by itself, is not an indicator of how unstable Germany is. What would give an indication is how many there are. And the article references no polls or surveys or statistics on the number of preppers in Germany. The closest it comes is, "There are around 20m preppers in the world today according to Bradley Garrett, an academic who has studied them; anywhere from 5m-15m are thought to be in America." Let's say, 10M are in the US. That leaves 10M out of ~7.55B in the rest of the world. Assuming uniform prevalence, that's 0.13% of the population. This is typical of much of modern journalism. Long-form emotional tone painting and little of substance.
- eloeffler 5y ago
  That's right. Even the amount of preppers would only be an indicator of subjective stability. It could as well be a kind of new apocalyptic religion. On a sidenote, the talk of social collapse is a popular propaganda theme of the extreme right.
  - lolthishuman 5y ago
    Aren’t you a representation of a subjective experience?
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  > 'Preppers', by definition, are those who have decided the world is unstable and on the brink of collapse. Not by definition. Maybe in practice. You might be a 'prepper' even if you think the chance of society collapsing is only 0.1% because you think it's a prudent hedge against a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. This might be rational from a personal perspective if you have enough wealth to burn such that 'prepping' for this 0.1% situation only costs 0.01% of your net worth.
  - mulvya 5y ago
    Oxford defines prudent as "sensible and careful when you make judgements and decisions; avoiding unnecessary risks" How can it be sensible if one thinks it's 'highly unlikely'? If one is very rich, then prepping may be financially affordable, but that doesn't make it cognitively rational.
sologoub 5y ago
Our collective memory is short. It is within our lifetimes that Germany was split between West Germany (BRD) and East Germany (DDR). The article describes the collapse of DDR, and while it was a softer landing than the rest of the soviet bloc, it was still a collapse of a state. There are many examples within the collective memory of generations alive today. Yet we don’t seem to learn as much as you’d think we should. Those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it?
- antientropic 5y ago
  East Germany did not "collapse" in any sense relevant to a discussion about preppers. It peacefully re-unified with West Germany and was never in anything resembling a state of anarchy.
  - sologoub 5y ago
    The shortages of pretty much everything and stasi terror tactics of the 1980s would resemble a “collapsed” state in most western views. It was not as bad as USSR or what we normally think of as a collapsed state (e.g. Haiti of today), but it sure was not even close to the western Germany standard of living. The article also goes on to describe poverty for the main protagonist well into early 2000. While I’m not German, so will likely never truly understand the cultural implications, the partitioning off of the forced soviet state in east Germany was a terrible outcome and had similar dire consequences as what happened in the rest of the eastern bloc.
disgu 5y ago
It's an interesting article and worth a read but the headline is straight up garbage. "The earth is not as round as we think. Just ask flat earthers". "The vaccines are not as good as we think. Just ask the anti-vaxxers". It's basically a story about this one person.
- senectus1 5y ago
  "HackerNews articles are not as well moderated as we think, just ask the commenters"
kohlerm 5y ago
Click bait. Just because there are preppers in Germany that doesn't mean it is not a stable country.
- schleck8 5y ago
  Saxon preppers expecting apocalypse, the title phrases it like a fact.
- red_trumpet 5y ago
  Yeah, it reads a bit like "We are all sick! Just ask hypochondriacs!"
paxys 5y ago
Extremely clickbait title, but I guess it has done its job considering we are now here talking about the article.
heisenbit 5y ago
Does The Economist has a disaster recovery plan?
35mm 5y ago
The Swedish government advises its citizens to become preppers[1]. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Germans do the same. [1] https://www.dinsakerhet.se/siteassets/dinsakerhet.se/broschyren-om-krisen-eller-kriget-kommer/om-krisen-eller-kriget-kommer---engelska.pdf https://www.dinsakerhet.se/siteassets/dinsakerhet.se/broschy...
- morsch 5y ago
  They do. Ten days of food and drink is a lot less than four months, though. https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Vorsorge/Bevorraten/bevorraten_node.htm https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Vorsorge/Bevorra...
- samus 5y ago
  Weather emergencies, blackouts, earthquakes, and sudden illness or quarantine are emergencies that are quite frequent. Therefore, many governments advise their citizen to maintain a stockpile to last something like 14 days. Longer than that implies a major breakdown of civilization that most individuals cannot effectively prepare for. This would have to happen on the community level at least. Unless you become a prepper and do it fulltime.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mat24a 5y ago
I'm more or less a german 'prepper', but this article doesnt really tell good reasons to prep. I personally think everyone should have food and water stored for atleast 14 days(which is also something the government recommends), because natural disasters or other disasters can still hit you, even when your country is stable. As for the stability of the country: In Germany we sadly have a very misguided energy policy. We are essentially building back more than we are building up. We are closing down or planning on closing down nuclear and coal, yet we are not even building enough renewable energy sources to cover the needed demand. Our energy storage capabilites are not enough. We dont have all the powerlines build or even planned that could transport the offshore wind park energy into the deeper mainland. We will be missing multiple gigawatthours in the future. As it seems Germany is just planning on importing the difference from countries around us. Sadly this makes not only the german grid unstable, but the whole european grid. We already had 2 close calls in the european grid this year, which luckily were resolved by the engineers. We are going closer and closer to an actual blackout, and this could cascade into larger areas of europe, since the grid is interconnected. A real blackout, and not just a temporary power out will take 10 to 14 days to resolve in optimistic calculations. If there are problems getting the grid started again this could well take longer. No power means: No running water after 1 day at best, no supermarkets, no fridges, no heating, no cooking on usual stoves, no phone calls, no internet, no fuel stations, etc. Of course no phone calls means you cant call the police, which is very practial for criminal gangs. No phone calls also means you cant call the firefighters, and if there is no running water whatsoever they will have a problem quickly as well. Streets will clog up because of accidents and cars running out of gasoline, blocking of the supply ways for hospitals. So they will also get into troube relatively fast. I could go on but I think you get the gist of it. A blackout would be like a temporary 'collapse' because the whole modern way of living is just suddenly halted, with people not being perpared for that. Now I think this scenario would be less drastic if people were aware of the danger and prepared accordingly. If everyone has some food and water then the shortages wont be as drastic immediately. Now I cant predict the exact date when this will happen, but I think that in the 3 years this will happen, unless we radically change our energy policy. Janurary next year will be interesting as there are some powerplants permanently going offline, which will increase the instability. You just need to have a bad day with not enough or too much wind and little sun, which is likely in the winter, and then you already have it. Add to that an increased demand though heating, light, etc, and the odds start looking worse. Some interesting links for the topic: https://www.smard.de/en https://www.smard.de/en (An official realtime tracker that shows how much energy is being produced by what source) https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/produkte/sonderberichte/2021/bund-steuert-energiewende-weiterhin-unzureichend https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/pro... (This one is in german, but here you can see some official data on the whole grid situation and its future.)
cudgy 5y ago
Why is it assumed by the author that the reader thinks Germany is stable?
jacknews 5y ago
There's nothing wrong with preparing for adverse conditions, covid lockdowns have surely proved the benefit of that. But that's different to preparing for the end of the world, 'end times' or whatever it's referred to. In that case, a basement full of beans might help for a while, but ultimately, it's the same as 'wealth' now. It doesn't really matter how much money you have, unless it's more than you'll ever use, it matters how much is flowing to you on a regular basis, sustainably. For 'collapse', it's probably much better to invest in a skill that would be useful in that situation, than in any kind of cache.

coliveira 5y ago

If Germany is not stable because its preppers, imagine the USA....

haspoken 5y ago

https://archive.is/wzx3J https://archive.is/wzx3J

emodendroket 5y ago

Yes, someone is always convinced the end of the world is right around the corner.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

Germany is doubling down on bad decisions, they basically gave up on software and they are ready to give up on other high Tech. This is what a gambler looks like, when he believes to be on a "luck streak" and wants to recover from recent losses by betting the farm.

kohlerm 5y ago
With regards to Software, SAP is still german and runs the worlds biggest companies
- kragen 5y ago
  Yeah, but people who use Haimer indicators or Audi cars constantly talk about how great they are, while people who use ABAP (SAP's flagship language) constantly talk about how shitty it is. SAP is not the Audi or even the Volkswagen of software; it's the Yugo. I'm curious why the grandparent thinks Germany is giving up on high tech. From afar Germany looks like a high-tech powerhouse, including in software. Ableton, Star Division, Revision (the demo party), and the Chaos Computer Club are much better exemplars of the German software scene than SAP.

curuinor 5y ago

How do you know that they didn't just watch a lot of American TV and YouTube and we didn't export our insanities into their heads?

vermilingua 5y ago
Even that aside, do we judge the health of the US based on the opinions of preppers? What an inane article.
- godelski 5y ago
  Honestly? I think many people do. Maybe not specifically peppers but other fringe groups. Though sometimes we pretend fringe groups are far larger than they actually are for long enough that they stop being fringe.
danjac 5y ago
Given all that Germany went through the past century (albeit if much of that was self-inflicted), it's hardly surprising that "prepper culture" will find fertile ground.
- andrew_eit 5y ago
  Actually, I would say that their history is an argument against the case that they are unstable. The fact that Germany had such a massive political and existential crisis that led them to war and genocide is still very much present in their memory. National pride is still something that is quite frowned upon (it would make people very uncomfortable say, if you walk around the street with a German flag and it's not clearly due to a football game). On the other hand, I would say countries that have not yet had any cultural or existential crisis in the last few hundred years as a nation are more at risk of collapse. Unless the country and culture is constantly changing and evolving and its population are similarly keen to routinely update the status quo, at some point it will fall out of sync with, people will get upset and wonder why things aren't like the good old days, find arbitrary reasons for this (identification of perpetrators and allocation of blame) and the upheaval will begin.

Proven 5y ago

They sit on a ton of IOUs from FPIIGs. Take that away and suddenly there's a lot less to spend. Governmental micromanagement and mismanagement is significant. Artificially inflated cost of energy has badly damaged the quality of life and the ECB is out of Germany's indirect control, ready to destroy whatever savings people have managed to put aside. If I lived in Germany I'd be a prepper, too. Of course, socialists (most responsible for the problems described above) think everyone can continue to live at another person's or country's expense ever after.

mulvya 5y ago

'Preppers', by definition, are those who have decided the world is unstable and on the brink of collapse. Their presence or opinion, by itself, is not an indicator of how unstable Germany is. What would give an indication is how many there are. And the article references no polls or surveys or statistics on the number of preppers in Germany. The closest it comes is, "There are around 20m preppers in the world today according to Bradley Garrett, an academic who has studied them; anywhere from 5m-15m are thought to be in America." Let's say, 10M are in the US. That leaves 10M out of ~7.55B in the rest of the world. Assuming uniform prevalence, that's 0.13% of the population. This is typical of much of modern journalism. Long-form emotional tone painting and little of substance.

eloeffler 5y ago
That's right. Even the amount of preppers would only be an indicator of subjective stability. It could as well be a kind of new apocalyptic religion. On a sidenote, the talk of social collapse is a popular propaganda theme of the extreme right.
- lolthishuman 5y ago
  Aren’t you a representation of a subjective experience?
fighterpilot 5y ago
> 'Preppers', by definition, are those who have decided the world is unstable and on the brink of collapse. Not by definition. Maybe in practice. You might be a 'prepper' even if you think the chance of society collapsing is only 0.1% because you think it's a prudent hedge against a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. This might be rational from a personal perspective if you have enough wealth to burn such that 'prepping' for this 0.1% situation only costs 0.01% of your net worth.
- mulvya 5y ago
  Oxford defines prudent as "sensible and careful when you make judgements and decisions; avoiding unnecessary risks" How can it be sensible if one thinks it's 'highly unlikely'? If one is very rich, then prepping may be financially affordable, but that doesn't make it cognitively rational.

sologoub 5y ago

Our collective memory is short. It is within our lifetimes that Germany was split between West Germany (BRD) and East Germany (DDR). The article describes the collapse of DDR, and while it was a softer landing than the rest of the soviet bloc, it was still a collapse of a state. There are many examples within the collective memory of generations alive today. Yet we don’t seem to learn as much as you’d think we should. Those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it?

antientropic 5y ago
East Germany did not "collapse" in any sense relevant to a discussion about preppers. It peacefully re-unified with West Germany and was never in anything resembling a state of anarchy.
- sologoub 5y ago
  The shortages of pretty much everything and stasi terror tactics of the 1980s would resemble a “collapsed” state in most western views. It was not as bad as USSR or what we normally think of as a collapsed state (e.g. Haiti of today), but it sure was not even close to the western Germany standard of living. The article also goes on to describe poverty for the main protagonist well into early 2000. While I’m not German, so will likely never truly understand the cultural implications, the partitioning off of the forced soviet state in east Germany was a terrible outcome and had similar dire consequences as what happened in the rest of the eastern bloc.

disgu 5y ago

It's an interesting article and worth a read but the headline is straight up garbage. "The earth is not as round as we think. Just ask flat earthers". "The vaccines are not as good as we think. Just ask the anti-vaxxers". It's basically a story about this one person.

senectus1 5y ago
"HackerNews articles are not as well moderated as we think, just ask the commenters"

kohlerm 5y ago

Click bait. Just because there are preppers in Germany that doesn't mean it is not a stable country.

schleck8 5y ago
Saxon preppers expecting apocalypse, the title phrases it like a fact.
red_trumpet 5y ago
Yeah, it reads a bit like "We are all sick! Just ask hypochondriacs!"

paxys 5y ago

Extremely clickbait title, but I guess it has done its job considering we are now here talking about the article.

heisenbit 5y ago

Does The Economist has a disaster recovery plan?

35mm 5y ago

The Swedish government advises its citizens to become preppers[1]. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Germans do the same. [1] https://www.dinsakerhet.se/siteassets/dinsakerhet.se/broschyren-om-krisen-eller-kriget-kommer/om-krisen-eller-kriget-kommer---engelska.pdf https://www.dinsakerhet.se/siteassets/dinsakerhet.se/broschy...

morsch 5y ago
They do. Ten days of food and drink is a lot less than four months, though. https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Vorsorge/Bevorraten/bevorraten_node.htm https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Vorsorge/Bevorra...
samus 5y ago
Weather emergencies, blackouts, earthquakes, and sudden illness or quarantine are emergencies that are quite frequent. Therefore, many governments advise their citizen to maintain a stockpile to last something like 14 days. Longer than that implies a major breakdown of civilization that most individuals cannot effectively prepare for. This would have to happen on the community level at least. Unless you become a prepper and do it fulltime.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mat24a 5y ago

I'm more or less a german 'prepper', but this article doesnt really tell good reasons to prep. I personally think everyone should have food and water stored for atleast 14 days(which is also something the government recommends), because natural disasters or other disasters can still hit you, even when your country is stable. As for the stability of the country: In Germany we sadly have a very misguided energy policy. We are essentially building back more than we are building up. We are closing down or planning on closing down nuclear and coal, yet we are not even building enough renewable energy sources to cover the needed demand. Our energy storage capabilites are not enough. We dont have all the powerlines build or even planned that could transport the offshore wind park energy into the deeper mainland. We will be missing multiple gigawatthours in the future. As it seems Germany is just planning on importing the difference from countries around us. Sadly this makes not only the german grid unstable, but the whole european grid. We already had 2 close calls in the european grid this year, which luckily were resolved by the engineers. We are going closer and closer to an actual blackout, and this could cascade into larger areas of europe, since the grid is interconnected. A real blackout, and not just a temporary power out will take 10 to 14 days to resolve in optimistic calculations. If there are problems getting the grid started again this could well take longer. No power means: No running water after 1 day at best, no supermarkets, no fridges, no heating, no cooking on usual stoves, no phone calls, no internet, no fuel stations, etc. Of course no phone calls means you cant call the police, which is very practial for criminal gangs. No phone calls also means you cant call the firefighters, and if there is no running water whatsoever they will have a problem quickly as well. Streets will clog up because of accidents and cars running out of gasoline, blocking of the supply ways for hospitals. So they will also get into troube relatively fast. I could go on but I think you get the gist of it. A blackout would be like a temporary 'collapse' because the whole modern way of living is just suddenly halted, with people not being perpared for that. Now I think this scenario would be less drastic if people were aware of the danger and prepared accordingly. If everyone has some food and water then the shortages wont be as drastic immediately. Now I cant predict the exact date when this will happen, but I think that in the 3 years this will happen, unless we radically change our energy policy. Janurary next year will be interesting as there are some powerplants permanently going offline, which will increase the instability. You just need to have a bad day with not enough or too much wind and little sun, which is likely in the winter, and then you already have it. Add to that an increased demand though heating, light, etc, and the odds start looking worse. Some interesting links for the topic: https://www.smard.de/en https://www.smard.de/en (An official realtime tracker that shows how much energy is being produced by what source) https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/produkte/sonderberichte/2021/bund-steuert-energiewende-weiterhin-unzureichend https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/pro... (This one is in german, but here you can see some official data on the whole grid situation and its future.)

cudgy 5y ago

Why is it assumed by the author that the reader thinks Germany is stable?

jacknews 5y ago

There's nothing wrong with preparing for adverse conditions, covid lockdowns have surely proved the benefit of that. But that's different to preparing for the end of the world, 'end times' or whatever it's referred to. In that case, a basement full of beans might help for a while, but ultimately, it's the same as 'wealth' now. It doesn't really matter how much money you have, unless it's more than you'll ever use, it matters how much is flowing to you on a regular basis, sustainably. For 'collapse', it's probably much better to invest in a skill that would be useful in that situation, than in any kind of cache.