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It very well could be the knowledge he has gained while living without money that will go toward educating masses of people out of work in our increasingly stru

by pj 17y ago

It very well could be the knowledge he has gained while living without money that will go toward educating masses of people out of work in our increasingly struggling economy moving forward. More people are losing jobs, homes, credit. Debt is increasing. How many people will know how to correctly identify edible cacti? I was thinking of my grandmother who survived the great depression. She has so much knowledge up there in her brain. How to can tomatoes for the winter. How to store potatoes in holes to keep them fresh during the cold months. How to stuff the gaps in the logs of a cabin with mud to stay warm. Countness numbers of the x-generation, y-generation, and even the baby boomers are going to die, simply because they do not know how to survive without money and a job and a grocery store. I feel lucky. I can go out into the woods and find an animal and kill it and skin it and cook it and eat it. Many of my friends can't even eat meat with bones in it because it reminds them it was alive.

Xichekolas 17y ago
> "Countness numbers of the x-generation, y-generation, and even the baby boomers are going to die, simply because they do not know how to survive without money and a job and a grocery store." What? The only reason people would need to be able to hunt their own food in our society is if that society totally and utterly collapsed. And not just a collapse of the government... I'm talking mass-fatality pandemic, nuclear holocaust, or zombies. Something that wipes out any local community that could band together and support itself. If anything that drastic happens, the average gen X'er/Y'er has a lot more to worry about than finding food (which can be scavenged for a while)... like surviving the initial die out, or roaming bands of looters.
- pj 17y ago
  Not where I live. 5% of my state suffers from "food insecurity" which means they dont know where their next meal is coming from. I went on a field trip as a child through a state park and the game ranger warned us all, he said, "Don't poach deer kids. If you are hungry and your parents want to poach deer out of season, tell them to call me and we'll help." He wasn't saying this as a joke. Many families here do procure a lot of their meat from hunting and fishing. A white tail deer can give you 100 lbs of meat. Thats $300-400. Rabbits, squirrels, quail, dove. Commonly eaten around here and much cheaper than the meat section at Wal-Mart. Once, at wal-mart, I was checking out and a large family in front of us was buying chicken in ten pound bags and I could smell it -- it was cheap because it was rotten. It smelled foul. Thank goodness the check out lady smelled it too and told them to go grab a different bag. I think perhaps some had leaked out and tainted the outside of the bags. I actually do think that some people may starve. I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this." It's worse than we realize. Our faith in the system has collapsed. We don't believe in it anymore. That isn't something that can be fixed by flooding society with more imaginary paper money.
  - erlanger 17y ago
    > A white tail deer can give you 100 lbs of meat. Man, that brings back memories...I felt like Bubba back when I was in second grade...venison burgers, venison chile, venison steaks, venison soup, venison tips, etc etc
  - BigZaphod 17y ago
    "It smelled foul." Nice.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    Hunting and fishing can also, sometimes, give you better quality of food than you could otherwise afford. I always grew up with smoked salmon on the cheap because we caught it ourselves and own a smoker. Fishing isn't a cheap hobby but it sure gets you a lot of fish out of the deal--often more than we could eat ourselves. And the fish are a lot fresher than anything you could buy.
  - sfphotoarts 17y ago
    "I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this."" I'm curious what, exactly your grandmother is seeing now that is worse than the great depression? Or quite possibly it's not worse than you think at all. I don't think you can speak for all with your notions of faith and belief. Economics doesn't need you to believe in it or have any faith in it. Its grounded in real and concrete math. Just because greed and poor practitioners of the science caused some instability in the system doesn't mean we need to resort to such outdated notions as faith. "it was cheap because it was rotten." - that doesn't make sense. I presume when the woman at the check out told them to find another bag it was the same price. Selling rotten food for a discount price will get Wal-mart into court. Enough of this survivalist sensationalism please.
    - jonah 17y ago
      "Economics doesn't need you to believe in it or have any faith in it. Its grounded in real and concrete math." Oh? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717293 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717293
- philwelch 17y ago
  You'd be surprised. My dad grew up in the Great Depression and during the war, though he implied that this kind of thing was the way of life before that in small towns: even if people had jobs, they still made their own clothing, had gardens, and hunted. People were remarkably self-sufficient. They had cars (one of the few manufactured goods they bought) but they maintained the cars themselves as well as their equipment. They even owned a little livestock. So yeah, a lot of people are going to be lost if we ever get into an economic state where consumer culture breaks down.
  - jonah 17y ago
    It's distressing how quickly we loose skills. Throw most Gen X/Y-ers back a generation or two and they'd be utterly lost - at least at first. We're also pretty adaptable.
- Readmore 17y ago
  +1 for zombies
jerf 17y ago
"I can go out into the woods and find an animal and kill it and skin it and cook it and eat it." What animals? If society collapses to that point, deer will be hunted to extinction in a matter of months, if not weeks, with smaller critters probably not getting hunted to extinction after that, but certainly to the point you won't find them readily anymore. There's still too many people with the skill to do that for you to survive. Thinking that you can Davy-Crockett your way out of a societal collapse is underestimating the number of people who can still hunt, or overestimating the amount of resources actually available. The brutality of such an outcome would be well beyond what I've seen any survivalist even faintly dream of, because if they looked at the truth (such as, "city folk are not a homogeneous mass of morons who would instantaneously starve to death, there'd still be enough to move out and cause trouble") they'd realize that it isn't a matter of "ensuring survival" so much as "incrementally increasing my odds of survival from the low single-digit percentages to the high single-digit percentages", which is way less fun to fantasize about. What this guy does is not scalable. wmeredith is exactly right. There aren't a whole lot of lessons to take away, except perhaps that we need less than we think we do, but that's hardly news anyhow.
- erlanger 17y ago
  You forgot about the firearm aspect of survivalism.
  - jerf 17y ago
    Actually, part of my point is about the firearm aspect of nonsurvivalists. # of armed people >>> # of survivalists. This is part of the reason I've not dedicated a whole lot of time to survivalism.
- dasil003 17y ago
  Depends what your particular survival skills are, how fast society collapses, and where you are when it happens.
- kragen 17y ago
  You know, when I'm trying to get code to be scalable, making it need less (less memory, less CPU time, less bandwidth) is a pretty key technique. I think that's true of human life too: if we can get by on less, more of us can survive.

by pj 17y ago

Xichekolas 17y ago

> "Countness numbers of the x-generation, y-generation, and even the baby boomers are going to die, simply because they do not know how to survive without money and a job and a grocery store." What? The only reason people would need to be able to hunt their own food in our society is if that society totally and utterly collapsed. And not just a collapse of the government... I'm talking mass-fatality pandemic, nuclear holocaust, or zombies. Something that wipes out any local community that could band together and support itself. If anything that drastic happens, the average gen X'er/Y'er has a lot more to worry about than finding food (which can be scavenged for a while)... like surviving the initial die out, or roaming bands of looters.

pj 17y ago
Not where I live. 5% of my state suffers from "food insecurity" which means they dont know where their next meal is coming from. I went on a field trip as a child through a state park and the game ranger warned us all, he said, "Don't poach deer kids. If you are hungry and your parents want to poach deer out of season, tell them to call me and we'll help." He wasn't saying this as a joke. Many families here do procure a lot of their meat from hunting and fishing. A white tail deer can give you 100 lbs of meat. Thats $300-400. Rabbits, squirrels, quail, dove. Commonly eaten around here and much cheaper than the meat section at Wal-Mart. Once, at wal-mart, I was checking out and a large family in front of us was buying chicken in ten pound bags and I could smell it -- it was cheap because it was rotten. It smelled foul. Thank goodness the check out lady smelled it too and told them to go grab a different bag. I think perhaps some had leaked out and tainted the outside of the bags. I actually do think that some people may starve. I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this." It's worse than we realize. Our faith in the system has collapsed. We don't believe in it anymore. That isn't something that can be fixed by flooding society with more imaginary paper money.
- erlanger 17y ago
  > A white tail deer can give you 100 lbs of meat. Man, that brings back memories...I felt like Bubba back when I was in second grade...venison burgers, venison chile, venison steaks, venison soup, venison tips, etc etc
- BigZaphod 17y ago
  "It smelled foul." Nice.
- philwelch 17y ago
  Hunting and fishing can also, sometimes, give you better quality of food than you could otherwise afford. I always grew up with smoked salmon on the cheap because we caught it ourselves and own a smoker. Fishing isn't a cheap hobby but it sure gets you a lot of fish out of the deal--often more than we could eat ourselves. And the fish are a lot fresher than anything you could buy.
- sfphotoarts 17y ago
  "I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this."" I'm curious what, exactly your grandmother is seeing now that is worse than the great depression? Or quite possibly it's not worse than you think at all. I don't think you can speak for all with your notions of faith and belief. Economics doesn't need you to believe in it or have any faith in it. Its grounded in real and concrete math. Just because greed and poor practitioners of the science caused some instability in the system doesn't mean we need to resort to such outdated notions as faith. "it was cheap because it was rotten." - that doesn't make sense. I presume when the woman at the check out told them to find another bag it was the same price. Selling rotten food for a discount price will get Wal-mart into court. Enough of this survivalist sensationalism please.
  - jonah 17y ago
    "Economics doesn't need you to believe in it or have any faith in it. Its grounded in real and concrete math." Oh? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717293 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717293
philwelch 17y ago
You'd be surprised. My dad grew up in the Great Depression and during the war, though he implied that this kind of thing was the way of life before that in small towns: even if people had jobs, they still made their own clothing, had gardens, and hunted. People were remarkably self-sufficient. They had cars (one of the few manufactured goods they bought) but they maintained the cars themselves as well as their equipment. They even owned a little livestock. So yeah, a lot of people are going to be lost if we ever get into an economic state where consumer culture breaks down.
- jonah 17y ago
  It's distressing how quickly we loose skills. Throw most Gen X/Y-ers back a generation or two and they'd be utterly lost - at least at first. We're also pretty adaptable.
Readmore 17y ago
+1 for zombies

jerf 17y ago

"I can go out into the woods and find an animal and kill it and skin it and cook it and eat it." What animals? If society collapses to that point, deer will be hunted to extinction in a matter of months, if not weeks, with smaller critters probably not getting hunted to extinction after that, but certainly to the point you won't find them readily anymore. There's still too many people with the skill to do that for you to survive. Thinking that you can Davy-Crockett your way out of a societal collapse is underestimating the number of people who can still hunt, or overestimating the amount of resources actually available. The brutality of such an outcome would be well beyond what I've seen any survivalist even faintly dream of, because if they looked at the truth (such as, "city folk are not a homogeneous mass of morons who would instantaneously starve to death, there'd still be enough to move out and cause trouble") they'd realize that it isn't a matter of "ensuring survival" so much as "incrementally increasing my odds of survival from the low single-digit percentages to the high single-digit percentages", which is way less fun to fantasize about. What this guy does is not scalable. wmeredith is exactly right. There aren't a whole lot of lessons to take away, except perhaps that we need less than we think we do, but that's hardly news anyhow.

erlanger 17y ago
You forgot about the firearm aspect of survivalism.
- jerf 17y ago
  Actually, part of my point is about the firearm aspect of nonsurvivalists. # of armed people >>> # of survivalists. This is part of the reason I've not dedicated a whole lot of time to survivalism.
dasil003 17y ago
Depends what your particular survival skills are, how fast society collapses, and where you are when it happens.
kragen 17y ago
You know, when I'm trying to get code to be scalable, making it need less (less memory, less CPU time, less bandwidth) is a pretty key technique. I think that's true of human life too: if we can get by on less, more of us can survive.