5 ms·

Well usually when people refer to someone as a prepper its the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals but still livin

by jmuguy 7mo ago

Well usually when people refer to someone as a prepper its the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals but still living on city water - like they're preparing for a disaster movie but not anything real. Specifically the idea that you would be able to stay in place, with all your hoarded disaster crap, during the end of the world is kind of funny.

wisty 7mo ago
Do you know of any preppers who buy guns and rations but don't have a plan for water? OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.
- bee_rider 7mo ago
  I don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…
  - judahmeek 7mo ago
    The term you're looking for is "homesteader"
  - armenarmen 7mo ago
    Mormons?
    - JuniperMesos 7mo ago
      Mormons have a widespread cultural practice of prepping, which I understand is mostly the sensible kind where you keep stocks of food and water onhand in case of a natural disaster (rather than the generally-less-sensible rifle militia LARPing). This is something that the institutional Church of Latter-Day Saints encourages among its members, and it strikes me as a pretty good thing to do. Nonetheless, there's no reason why you need to accept the other religious tenets of the LDS church in order to do sensible emergency preparedness, and I'm not sure that not every Mormon community or household is equally diligent about preparedness.
  - moorow 7mo ago
    "staff engineer"
  - pigpop 7mo ago
    Well, we did have a term for it until it got dragged and sensationalized in the media. I'd tell you that's a standard "psyop" that the propaganda arm of the government often uses against communities and subcultures that they want to discredit and suppress for one reason or another but then you'd probably call me a conspiracy theorist[1]. [1] another example of a successful smear campaign
reaperducer 7mo ago
the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals Both of which are available at Wal-Mart. I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food. I'm sure it's for hurricanes. Yeah, that's it.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  Costco sells those, too. https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-food-pallet-246ct-2814-total-servings/100843064?langId=-1 https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-f... Sometimes they even appear in stores. Apparently Mormons are required to keep some amount of emergency food on site.
  - yobert 7mo ago
    Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.
  - vetrom 7mo ago
    Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to. Source: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-centers?lang=eng https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-center... (In older literature & analysis it used to be called the LDS Cannery or LDS Dry Cannery, but I guess they recently rebranded it.)
- vetrom 7mo ago
  This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement. Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific. "For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S. There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues. Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).
K0balt 7mo ago
I think that pepper mostly exists in movies. Certainly some people probably emulate the Hollywood version, but I think that’s about it. Most “peppers” are fathers that have had the good sense to pause and think “so, what would I be able to do to serve my family if something disastrous happened? What might that look like?” Usually, a disaster go-bag of some kind with enough basic supplies to weather a day or two of displacement suspension of normal services. Sometimes, if they live in a place where it’s reasonable to imagine staying put is a good option, they might also have a generator and fuel, a week or two worth of long shelf life food, and some water storage. That ensures the wellbeing of their family will not be contingent on outside help, at least during most common disasters. Many of these people may also have a gun or two, for defense or for hunting if they are rural. Some people go beyond that, and sometimes with a military focus, other times with months of rations, a bunker, or other unusual preparations. Mostly, those are not based on realistic scenarios. In almost any protracted disruption, having a lot of supplies , armaments, or resources will be as much a liability as an asset. People that buy guns -for prepping- are just living out some kind of hero fantasy. If you own guns, and use guns as part of your normal life, it would make sense to have a solid reserve of ammunition. If guns are your disaster scenario, you’re going to have a bad day. As an individual or nuclear family, to weather an extended problem, you’d need to have a literal secret underground lair that was either so hard to get to or so well hidden that no one would know, and you’d have to be completely self contained. That’s simply not practical for all but actual billionaires, but people cosplay this to varying degrees. Even billionaires might find ymmv. A much more practical and wholesome approach is to be part of a community that includes farming, independent sources of power and water, and generally sustainable independence from less robust centralized systems. This provides for basic necessities as well as a common defense. Humans lived in tribes for a reason, and 30 people with well aligned incentives and sustainable infrastructure for food, water, and energy is probably the absolute minimum viable structure for security during a disruption of more than a couple of months. Otherwise you would be dependant on total stealth or extreme isolation. Some neighbourhoods would probably coalesce into something resembling this, but organisation ad-hoc under pressure would probably end up with tensions if not violence. Projects like this one can be real resources for well organized communities. I’ll probably look at running this on our servers as an additional resource, along with our library.
philipallstar 7mo ago
This is just a straw man, though. We all have biases of course.

by jmuguy 7mo ago

wisty 7mo ago

Do you know of any preppers who buy guns and rations but don't have a plan for water? OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.

bee_rider 7mo ago
I don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…
- judahmeek 7mo ago
  The term you're looking for is "homesteader"
- armenarmen 7mo ago
  Mormons?
  - JuniperMesos 7mo ago
    Mormons have a widespread cultural practice of prepping, which I understand is mostly the sensible kind where you keep stocks of food and water onhand in case of a natural disaster (rather than the generally-less-sensible rifle militia LARPing). This is something that the institutional Church of Latter-Day Saints encourages among its members, and it strikes me as a pretty good thing to do. Nonetheless, there's no reason why you need to accept the other religious tenets of the LDS church in order to do sensible emergency preparedness, and I'm not sure that not every Mormon community or household is equally diligent about preparedness.
- moorow 7mo ago
  "staff engineer"
- pigpop 7mo ago
  Well, we did have a term for it until it got dragged and sensationalized in the media. I'd tell you that's a standard "psyop" that the propaganda arm of the government often uses against communities and subcultures that they want to discredit and suppress for one reason or another but then you'd probably call me a conspiracy theorist[1]. [1] another example of a successful smear campaign

reaperducer 7mo ago

the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals Both of which are available at Wal-Mart. I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food. I'm sure it's for hurricanes. Yeah, that's it.

bombcar 7mo ago
Costco sells those, too. https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-food-pallet-246ct-2814-total-servings/100843064?langId=-1 https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-f... Sometimes they even appear in stores. Apparently Mormons are required to keep some amount of emergency food on site.
- yobert 7mo ago
  Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.
- vetrom 7mo ago
  Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to. Source: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-centers?lang=eng https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-center... (In older literature & analysis it used to be called the LDS Cannery or LDS Dry Cannery, but I guess they recently rebranded it.)
vetrom 7mo ago
This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement. Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific. "For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S. There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues. Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).

K0balt 7mo ago

I think that pepper mostly exists in movies. Certainly some people probably emulate the Hollywood version, but I think that’s about it. Most “peppers” are fathers that have had the good sense to pause and think “so, what would I be able to do to serve my family if something disastrous happened? What might that look like?” Usually, a disaster go-bag of some kind with enough basic supplies to weather a day or two of displacement suspension of normal services. Sometimes, if they live in a place where it’s reasonable to imagine staying put is a good option, they might also have a generator and fuel, a week or two worth of long shelf life food, and some water storage. That ensures the wellbeing of their family will not be contingent on outside help, at least during most common disasters. Many of these people may also have a gun or two, for defense or for hunting if they are rural. Some people go beyond that, and sometimes with a military focus, other times with months of rations, a bunker, or other unusual preparations. Mostly, those are not based on realistic scenarios. In almost any protracted disruption, having a lot of supplies , armaments, or resources will be as much a liability as an asset. People that buy guns -for prepping- are just living out some kind of hero fantasy. If you own guns, and use guns as part of your normal life, it would make sense to have a solid reserve of ammunition. If guns are your disaster scenario, you’re going to have a bad day. As an individual or nuclear family, to weather an extended problem, you’d need to have a literal secret underground lair that was either so hard to get to or so well hidden that no one would know, and you’d have to be completely self contained. That’s simply not practical for all but actual billionaires, but people cosplay this to varying degrees. Even billionaires might find ymmv. A much more practical and wholesome approach is to be part of a community that includes farming, independent sources of power and water, and generally sustainable independence from less robust centralized systems. This provides for basic necessities as well as a common defense. Humans lived in tribes for a reason, and 30 people with well aligned incentives and sustainable infrastructure for food, water, and energy is probably the absolute minimum viable structure for security during a disruption of more than a couple of months. Otherwise you would be dependant on total stealth or extreme isolation. Some neighbourhoods would probably coalesce into something resembling this, but organisation ad-hoc under pressure would probably end up with tensions if not violence. Projects like this one can be real resources for well organized communities. I’ll probably look at running this on our servers as an additional resource, along with our library.

philipallstar 7mo ago

This is just a straw man, though. We all have biases of course.