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I'll throw in my $0.02 on this topic. I have a basement full of shelf stable foods, a reasonably large battery backup system plus some solar panels, and a coup

I'll throw in my $0.02 on this topic. I have a basement full of shelf stable foods, a reasonably large battery backup system plus some solar panels, and a couple of guns. I don't see civilization collapsing overnight. I see it playing out as a series of scarce times that ebb and flow. I don't think the supermarket will go away, but I do think there will be times when it looks like those videos of Soviet groceries, where there's not much selection. And I'm aware that natural disasters are increasing in frequency and cost/impact to a degree that the government won't or can't do anything about them. So I need to be able to weather the storms for a few months at a time. As an aside, I also prepared by living in a neighborhood where people take care of each other and is close enough I can walk/bike to places. Basically, I picture the USA collapse as turning the place into Puerto Rico, not Mad Max.

zahlman 1y ago
> I don't think the supermarket will go away, but I do think there will be times when it looks like those videos of Soviet groceries, where there's not much selection. Seems to me we already saw that in 2020.
- mywittyname 1y ago
  Yeah. My mindset is assume "2020" becomes a regular occurrence that gets progressively worse over time. And I'll mentally work through situations such as "2020 with an extended utilities outage", or "2020 but car travel is not possible", or "2020 plus pervasive violent hate crimes". Then we dry run for the weekend. You learn a surprising amount in that first day. I.e., being stuck without power/internet/cell service/water, and realizing you can't watch DVDs on your laptop because they haven't come with disk drives for years. After the weekend, you end up with a list of issues to address, i.e., you buy a portable dvd drive and put together a Plex server with a bunch of locally-hosted media. Honestly, I feel more capable and resilient than I ever have before. We had some tornadoes come through and we didn't even need to think about what to do, we went into our safe room which contains our go-bags, hiking food, critical docs, usb backups of key pass, battery backups and some ipads, and we chilled out watching a weather channel and listening to the emergency radio. Had a tornado hit our house, I'm confident we would have survived, been able to help the neighbors, and manage a few days until aid could come.

zahlman 1y ago

> I don't think the supermarket will go away, but I do think there will be times when it looks like those videos of Soviet groceries, where there's not much selection. Seems to me we already saw that in 2020.

mywittyname 1y ago
Yeah. My mindset is assume "2020" becomes a regular occurrence that gets progressively worse over time. And I'll mentally work through situations such as "2020 with an extended utilities outage", or "2020 but car travel is not possible", or "2020 plus pervasive violent hate crimes". Then we dry run for the weekend. You learn a surprising amount in that first day. I.e., being stuck without power/internet/cell service/water, and realizing you can't watch DVDs on your laptop because they haven't come with disk drives for years. After the weekend, you end up with a list of issues to address, i.e., you buy a portable dvd drive and put together a Plex server with a bunch of locally-hosted media. Honestly, I feel more capable and resilient than I ever have before. We had some tornadoes come through and we didn't even need to think about what to do, we went into our safe room which contains our go-bags, hiking food, critical docs, usb backups of key pass, battery backups and some ipads, and we chilled out watching a weather channel and listening to the emergency radio. Had a tornado hit our house, I'm confident we would have survived, been able to help the neighbors, and manage a few days until aid could come.