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If you have enough money in the bank to buy groceries you have enough money to take out of the bank and put in your mattress for groceries. Also HN will probab

If you have enough money in the bank to buy groceries you have enough money to take out of the bank and put in your mattress for groceries. Also HN will probably get upset for me saying this but a few grams of gold or silver or other goods easily tradeable like whiskey or ammo never hurt anybody and might buy you a pig to slaughter or something.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> few grams of gold or silver I remember, a few years ago, Cupertino being targeted for burglaries because the Indian and Taiwanese immigrant populations had a penchant for storing wealth in gold and silver and cash under the mattress, respectively. The victims’ recovery rates and timelines were far poorer than these BofA customers’ will be.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tristor 4y ago
  Which is an interesting comparison because these are not the only immigrant populations that do this, there are large groups of immigrant populations in Texas who are largely unbanked or underbanked or have cultural penchants for using gold and silver as stores of value, but there has been no concerted effort to burglarize them, because strings of home invasions in Texas usually end up with the home invaders in a body bag regardless of who they decide to target.
  - shuckles 4y ago
    Can you help my understand why this article cites a higher per capita burglary rate in Texas than California (it claims the data is from the FBI)? https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statistics/ https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statist...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - pkaye 4y ago
    Why does Texas has so many reported burglaries though? https://www.statista.com/statistics/232539/burglaries-reported-in-the-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/232539/burglaries-report...
    - svggrfgovgf 4y ago
      Probably because these statistics are based on reported burglaries as opposed to the actual number of burglaries. It's my impression from various threads and news articles that people in California have given up on reporting all sorts of crimes due to the lack of prosecution.
      - martinflack 4y ago
        California is a big place with a lot of varying community attitudes... that sounds like quite a big assumption.
      - pkaye 4y ago
        Must be the same situation in Florida then?
    - akiselev 4y ago
      Because stolen guns are very valuable and the owners have to officially report them stolen to avoid all the possible criminal charges.
      - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        People report gun theft in order to make possession of it unambiguously a crime same as with cars and other serialized property. Nobody with a brain actually thinks the police in the next state over are gonna seriously suspect them of something when their handgun inevitably gets recovered in an unrelated crime.
    - WillPostForFood 4y ago
      1: The data is obviously completely bogus unless you believe there were only 11 burglaries in Florida in all of 2021. You can't draw anything from it. 2: Texas is the second most populous state, so total # has little value. You need the per capita number to understand whether their might be some deterrence happening. Unfortunately the Statista data is garbage, so it isn't worth calculating.
  - mcguire 4y ago
    This is false. Texas and California are roughly tied in burglaries per capita, 370.7 and 369.7 per 100,000. New Mexico has the most, at 648.8/100,000. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-the-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...) Interestingly, New Mexico has a bit more than three times as many guns per capita as Texas. (https://www.statista.com/chart/21894/firearms-in-each-state/ https://www.statista.com/chart/21894/firearms-in-each-state/) Property crime rates are going to be suppressed in Texas among the (undocumented) immigrant population because of a justifiable lack of trust between them and police. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.22221 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.22221) The NCVS should give better data, but I'm damned if I can find it.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  That happens a lot in many segments of the population. When my uncle was detective, there were similar incidents among the orthodox Jewish community, as the cultural preference from the diamond trade was instant settlement. It’s also easier to move gold across borders. Many folks were hesitant to call the police which made it worse. Prepper people get targeted alot as well. One dude in my hometown was a victim of a home invasion, held hostage and lost about $250k of guns, ammo and silver. You don’t hear alot of about this stuff because typically these communities are not exactly following the letter of the law from a tax perspective.
  - mikrotikker 4y ago
    He could have prepared better.
- mindslight 4y ago
  The recovery rates and timelines are only relevant for the cost. The key part is that its failure is uncorrelated with bank failure. It's not either/or, but rather multi-source redundancy.
Consultant32452 4y ago
People have no trouble conceptualizing insurance. We have car insurance, home-owners insurance, life insurance, etc. But what about "every day life" insurance? It doesn't take much cash on hand or some staples in the cupboard to protect against a wide variety of temporary "glitches" in life. Glitches can be anything from surprise weather events to things like your bank accounts becoming temporarily unavailable. Importantly, insurance is not an investment we intend to get a return on. It's a cost.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Heh, I didn’t even notice the covid paper products shortage on accounts of having every day life insurance in the form of a Costco membership and having bought toilet paper some months before. Buying in bulk isn’t even a cost, the cost of capital sitting idle in the form of a shelf of stuff I won’t need for a long time is more than made up for with the volume discount. Not only are the bulk beans a tiny fraction of the cost per bean, they’re fresher and higher quality. Also it is an investment that returns in time savings. Buying 50 rolls of TP takes the same amount of time as buying 1.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    Same here, we try and keep 3 months supply of groceries on hand from costco at all times. Once a month we look through what won't last 3 more months and stock up, and once you actually figure out what you need it's surprisingly cheap. For example we skipped our December trip because of the holidays and so spent around $1100 for our family of six. Which sounds like a lot but when you stretch it out over 2 or 3 months that less than $100 a person. I'd recommend everyone who can does this.
    - jxramos 4y ago
      you have any tips for managing expiration dates? Me and the wife were getting into this subject recently. I'm considering buying a barcode scanner and just have an in and out spreadsheet that somehow I manage. Still tinkering with a few ideas. We have a big family and there's potential for a lot of food waste if not managed properly.
Buttons840 4y ago
You're responding to a concern about society with a suggestion for individuals. It may be good advice for individuals, but do you think most people are going to follow it?
- e_i_pi_2 4y ago
  Great response - even if I can buy a pig with bullets it doesn't help anything else. That assumes you can butcher and store the meat. This seems like a kind of bikeshedding argument - the bike shed is built so don't worry about the actual nuclear reactor, you can always just hide in the bike shed. Doesn't matter how well built the bike shed is - you're still surrounded by nuclear fallout
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
sneak 4y ago
I've been saying this for a long time: https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/ https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/ Cash isn't illegal yet. Use it. Don't use any one system exclusively. Even if you rely wholly on your normal person checking account and electronic payments, have a few grand stashed away in your house in cash. Sometimes the lights go out, and ATMs with them.
- jxramos 4y ago
  hey, this is pretty neat to see a word count summary up front > ( 2341 words, approximately 13 minutes reading time. ) I'd love to see that in every article and perhaps have some css setting that I could globally twiddle for every website so folks could opt in or out as they please. I suppose an extension could possibly tackle it too if the semantics are correct on the page.
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    Firefox reader view gives a reading time estimate.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
In the event that you are trading gold and silver and ammo, your first problem will be holding onto your gold and ammo in the first place. Which means if you are prepping for this scenario, your first order of business is to be part of a tribe willing and able to defend you.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  This is why I believe leadership in urban environments would quickly turn over to existing city gangs in a collapse scenario. Maybe the police would be one gang that controls a fraction of the city. Urban gangs already have the required tribal associations, intimate understanding of the terrain and resources therein, and the propensity to commit violence that would be required to take control. Any of us good citizens who keep our heads down, go to work, avoid violence at all costs, and individually prep for a collapse without building existing association to a coherent tribe will end up quickly dead or subservient to these existing tribes.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    The question is, in total societal collapse situation do you want to live? I am not sure I would want to.
    - Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
      I'd just want to stick around to see how things panned out, it'd be pretty interesting.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
If we're in a situation where society devolves to the point where people have to trade whisky or ammo for a pig to eat then half of us are going to end up murdered for anything valuable to begin with.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  If it gets to that point we're (or at least a non-trivial fraction of us) gonna end up murdered not because people want what we have but because by the time things fall apart like that people will hate us and want us dead. French revolution, Russian revolution, Europe's religious wars during/after the reformation, etc, the professional classes of people who built and maintained "the system" don't tend to do to well at the hands of everyone else when it finally keels over.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
A month or so of salary in cash at home, and some "hard assets" is a good hedge.
- astrange 4y ago
  Under what situation could that possibly be useful where all society hasn't collapsed? You're not going to lose access to your bank account because the bank failed; the FDIC handles that. It just moves to a different bank over the weekend. Locked out because Chexsystems thinks you're a financial criminal is more in the direction of possible.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    I've had banks go technologically tits up and render my funds inaccessible for multiple days in the past. Card payments fucked, etc. Has happened to more than one bank I've used, in more than one country. I've also had a bank freeze my account temporarily (for over a week) because some risk algorithm somewhere thought fraud was occurring. All those times, having a bunch of cash handy was very useful. As for hard assets: they make a decent hedge against financial shithousery.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    > Under what situation could that possibly be useful where all society hasn't collapsed? In a natural disaster type situation it could easily be the difference between being able to get what you need stay put the whole time or running out of some supply you didn't think you'd need and having to evacuate half way through the follow-on mess and losing quite a bit to looters and/or the environment. The other person who replied mentioned more mundane stuff.
- e_i_pi_2 4y ago
  As some other replies have said - the best and most reasonable hedge is to rely on your community and have good bonds there. Doesn't matter how much cash you have if people don't care about that anymore, the best option is to have social bonds and have a community to support you, no person is an island etc $100 under your mattress for the future is not worth nearly as much as giving that money to a friend to help them cover rent today
rurp 4y ago
Slaughtering a pig isn't some trivial process, it requires skill and equipment that most people lack. But even if it was doable and a person trades their emergency gold for a couple weeks of food, then what? Any disaster that reduces society to pig bartering isn't likely to be fixed in a short amount of time.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> few grams of gold or silver I remember, a few years ago, Cupertino being targeted for burglaries because the Indian and Taiwanese immigrant populations had a penchant for storing wealth in gold and silver and cash under the mattress, respectively. The victims’ recovery rates and timelines were far poorer than these BofA customers’ will be.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tristor 4y ago
Which is an interesting comparison because these are not the only immigrant populations that do this, there are large groups of immigrant populations in Texas who are largely unbanked or underbanked or have cultural penchants for using gold and silver as stores of value, but there has been no concerted effort to burglarize them, because strings of home invasions in Texas usually end up with the home invaders in a body bag regardless of who they decide to target.
- shuckles 4y ago
  Can you help my understand why this article cites a higher per capita burglary rate in Texas than California (it claims the data is from the FBI)? https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statistics/ https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statist...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pkaye 4y ago
  Why does Texas has so many reported burglaries though? https://www.statista.com/statistics/232539/burglaries-reported-in-the-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/232539/burglaries-report...
  - svggrfgovgf 4y ago
    Probably because these statistics are based on reported burglaries as opposed to the actual number of burglaries. It's my impression from various threads and news articles that people in California have given up on reporting all sorts of crimes due to the lack of prosecution.
    - martinflack 4y ago
      California is a big place with a lot of varying community attitudes... that sounds like quite a big assumption.
    - pkaye 4y ago
      Must be the same situation in Florida then?
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Because stolen guns are very valuable and the owners have to officially report them stolen to avoid all the possible criminal charges.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      People report gun theft in order to make possession of it unambiguously a crime same as with cars and other serialized property. Nobody with a brain actually thinks the police in the next state over are gonna seriously suspect them of something when their handgun inevitably gets recovered in an unrelated crime.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    1: The data is obviously completely bogus unless you believe there were only 11 burglaries in Florida in all of 2021. You can't draw anything from it. 2: Texas is the second most populous state, so total # has little value. You need the per capita number to understand whether their might be some deterrence happening. Unfortunately the Statista data is garbage, so it isn't worth calculating.
- mcguire 4y ago
  This is false. Texas and California are roughly tied in burglaries per capita, 370.7 and 369.7 per 100,000. New Mexico has the most, at 648.8/100,000. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-the-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...) Interestingly, New Mexico has a bit more than three times as many guns per capita as Texas. (https://www.statista.com/chart/21894/firearms-in-each-state/ https://www.statista.com/chart/21894/firearms-in-each-state/) Property crime rates are going to be suppressed in Texas among the (undocumented) immigrant population because of a justifiable lack of trust between them and police. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.22221 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.22221) The NCVS should give better data, but I'm damned if I can find it.
Spooky23 4y ago
That happens a lot in many segments of the population. When my uncle was detective, there were similar incidents among the orthodox Jewish community, as the cultural preference from the diamond trade was instant settlement. It’s also easier to move gold across borders. Many folks were hesitant to call the police which made it worse. Prepper people get targeted alot as well. One dude in my hometown was a victim of a home invasion, held hostage and lost about $250k of guns, ammo and silver. You don’t hear alot of about this stuff because typically these communities are not exactly following the letter of the law from a tax perspective.
- mikrotikker 4y ago
  He could have prepared better.
mindslight 4y ago
The recovery rates and timelines are only relevant for the cost. The key part is that its failure is uncorrelated with bank failure. It's not either/or, but rather multi-source redundancy.

Consultant32452 4y ago

People have no trouble conceptualizing insurance. We have car insurance, home-owners insurance, life insurance, etc. But what about "every day life" insurance? It doesn't take much cash on hand or some staples in the cupboard to protect against a wide variety of temporary "glitches" in life. Glitches can be anything from surprise weather events to things like your bank accounts becoming temporarily unavailable. Importantly, insurance is not an investment we intend to get a return on. It's a cost.

colechristensen 4y ago
Heh, I didn’t even notice the covid paper products shortage on accounts of having every day life insurance in the form of a Costco membership and having bought toilet paper some months before. Buying in bulk isn’t even a cost, the cost of capital sitting idle in the form of a shelf of stuff I won’t need for a long time is more than made up for with the volume discount. Not only are the bulk beans a tiny fraction of the cost per bean, they’re fresher and higher quality. Also it is an investment that returns in time savings. Buying 50 rolls of TP takes the same amount of time as buying 1.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  Same here, we try and keep 3 months supply of groceries on hand from costco at all times. Once a month we look through what won't last 3 more months and stock up, and once you actually figure out what you need it's surprisingly cheap. For example we skipped our December trip because of the holidays and so spent around $1100 for our family of six. Which sounds like a lot but when you stretch it out over 2 or 3 months that less than $100 a person. I'd recommend everyone who can does this.
  - jxramos 4y ago
    you have any tips for managing expiration dates? Me and the wife were getting into this subject recently. I'm considering buying a barcode scanner and just have an in and out spreadsheet that somehow I manage. Still tinkering with a few ideas. We have a big family and there's potential for a lot of food waste if not managed properly.

Buttons840 4y ago

You're responding to a concern about society with a suggestion for individuals. It may be good advice for individuals, but do you think most people are going to follow it?

e_i_pi_2 4y ago
Great response - even if I can buy a pig with bullets it doesn't help anything else. That assumes you can butcher and store the meat. This seems like a kind of bikeshedding argument - the bike shed is built so don't worry about the actual nuclear reactor, you can always just hide in the bike shed. Doesn't matter how well built the bike shed is - you're still surrounded by nuclear fallout
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

sneak 4y ago

I've been saying this for a long time: https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/ https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/ Cash isn't illegal yet. Use it. Don't use any one system exclusively. Even if you rely wholly on your normal person checking account and electronic payments, have a few grand stashed away in your house in cash. Sometimes the lights go out, and ATMs with them.

jxramos 4y ago
hey, this is pretty neat to see a word count summary up front > ( 2341 words, approximately 13 minutes reading time. ) I'd love to see that in every article and perhaps have some css setting that I could globally twiddle for every website so folks could opt in or out as they please. I suppose an extension could possibly tackle it too if the semantics are correct on the page.
- BenjiWiebe 4y ago
  Firefox reader view gives a reading time estimate.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

In the event that you are trading gold and silver and ammo, your first problem will be holding onto your gold and ammo in the first place. Which means if you are prepping for this scenario, your first order of business is to be part of a tribe willing and able to defend you.

anonporridge 4y ago
This is why I believe leadership in urban environments would quickly turn over to existing city gangs in a collapse scenario. Maybe the police would be one gang that controls a fraction of the city. Urban gangs already have the required tribal associations, intimate understanding of the terrain and resources therein, and the propensity to commit violence that would be required to take control. Any of us good citizens who keep our heads down, go to work, avoid violence at all costs, and individually prep for a collapse without building existing association to a coherent tribe will end up quickly dead or subservient to these existing tribes.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  The question is, in total societal collapse situation do you want to live? I am not sure I would want to.
  - Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
    I'd just want to stick around to see how things panned out, it'd be pretty interesting.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

If we're in a situation where society devolves to the point where people have to trade whisky or ammo for a pig to eat then half of us are going to end up murdered for anything valuable to begin with.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
If it gets to that point we're (or at least a non-trivial fraction of us) gonna end up murdered not because people want what we have but because by the time things fall apart like that people will hate us and want us dead. French revolution, Russian revolution, Europe's religious wars during/after the reformation, etc, the professional classes of people who built and maintained "the system" don't tend to do to well at the hands of everyone else when it finally keels over.

nibbleshifter 4y ago

A month or so of salary in cash at home, and some "hard assets" is a good hedge.

astrange 4y ago
Under what situation could that possibly be useful where all society hasn't collapsed? You're not going to lose access to your bank account because the bank failed; the FDIC handles that. It just moves to a different bank over the weekend. Locked out because Chexsystems thinks you're a financial criminal is more in the direction of possible.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  I've had banks go technologically tits up and render my funds inaccessible for multiple days in the past. Card payments fucked, etc. Has happened to more than one bank I've used, in more than one country. I've also had a bank freeze my account temporarily (for over a week) because some risk algorithm somewhere thought fraud was occurring. All those times, having a bunch of cash handy was very useful. As for hard assets: they make a decent hedge against financial shithousery.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  > Under what situation could that possibly be useful where all society hasn't collapsed? In a natural disaster type situation it could easily be the difference between being able to get what you need stay put the whole time or running out of some supply you didn't think you'd need and having to evacuate half way through the follow-on mess and losing quite a bit to looters and/or the environment. The other person who replied mentioned more mundane stuff.
e_i_pi_2 4y ago
As some other replies have said - the best and most reasonable hedge is to rely on your community and have good bonds there. Doesn't matter how much cash you have if people don't care about that anymore, the best option is to have social bonds and have a community to support you, no person is an island etc $100 under your mattress for the future is not worth nearly as much as giving that money to a friend to help them cover rent today

rurp 4y ago

Slaughtering a pig isn't some trivial process, it requires skill and equipment that most people lack. But even if it was doable and a person trades their emergency gold for a couple weeks of food, then what? Any disaster that reduces society to pig bartering isn't likely to be fixed in a short amount of time.