…if they bother learning how to grow crops at all. A lot of them don’t seem to have given much thought to what will happen when the canned stuff runs out because they’ve spent all their time at the gun range instead of in the community garden.
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I remember this. They’re still wrangling over that? What an asshole.
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I suspect that what they believe will happen is that they’ll kidnap all the middle aged women who work in community gardens at gun point and make them do all the work, like the warlords they believe themselves to be… also, harem.
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And his attorneys can claim with a straight face he is not an escape risk?
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And wash their underwear. Hand washing clothing is a time-consuming (and back-breaking) task.
The automatic washing machine will likely have been the biggest “game changer” for time/effort save on mainlining a family home (bigger than having a fridge, freezer or oven).
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I seem to remember that being a plot point early in The Walking Dead with Carol and other women in the first camp they had outside of ATL doing the laundry and complaining about it…
It really freed up women’s time back when they came on the market and people could get one on lay-away in the 20s.
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I was listening to an interview with a survival expert the other day and he made the same point. While it’s good sense to have a couple of weeks worth of emergency supplies, if the crisis goes on for more than 30 days you’re going to need your community if you want to recover.
In contrast, preppers seem to be under the impression that once their two months’ worth of Jeebus slop buckets run out that normal life will be restored through the magic of owning semi-automatic rifles and numismatic gold.
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Yes, humans evolved as social creatures and preppers are often decidedly antisocial individuals. If your first order of business in the brave new world is accumulating enough firepower to keep all the other human beings in the area far away from you and your stuff then you’re not going to thrive in the long run.
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They’re probably also expecting to take everybody else’s stuff at gunpoint, which will stop working when there isn’t any more stuff to take.
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Here in Australia, the national broadcaster interviewed a few preppers and the tone was remarkably different. Some of the views expressed:
- There’s no point preparing for solo survival. Survival is a team sport.
- Stockpiling guns and gold is a recipe for getting killed - you have to sleep some time. It’s much safer to be around people who trust each other.
- When asked “what should you stockpile”, a prepper replied “people have always liked to trade for things they don’t have. I’m stockpiling waxed blocks of cheese.”
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It’ll also stop working when they fall asleep at the wrong time.
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Thats… actually a smart approach.
A cheese-hoarding prepper is just going to be that local person, “who really likes cheese, even got a hobby going ageing their own cheeses, which is cool”.
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One of the most fun parts of the novel “World War Z” was a chapter talking about what a royal pain in the butt doomsday preppers/survivalists were. They were given the nickname “LMOE’s” (pronounced Lame-o’s) for “Last Men on Earth”. By isolating themselves and loading up on guns, they were living like rodents while small communities were thriving.
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On that note, I would probably start a pickling and fermentation/distilling effort. Pickling makes everything last longer, and alcohol has a lot of utility beyond getting plastered.
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Not a problem if you’ve got men with guns to guard the loot.
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I often wonder how many days it’ll take a group with that mindset to turn paranoid about each other.
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Their loyalty is secured by ???
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Which leads to its own difficulties, even for billionaires:
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.
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A share of the loot, until the loot runs out.
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