Saturday, July 1, 2017

are you really a prepper?


ARE YOU REALLY A PREPPER?
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note: it's an older book-see if you can find it in the library.  "The Invisible Scar" by Caroline Bird is the best book I've ever read on The Great Depression.  Starts at street level and examines the event more from the individuals level, even as it covers things from a macro-perspective.  You'll be more frightened by this than any current fear mongering, as it stripes away the propaganda and it will remind you of how history is now repeating itself.
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note: Junes donations and Amazon commission came in at $290.  Thank you everyone.  I love you all long time.  Having said that, please don't forget you are still on the hook for your dollar a month if you haven't pre-paid, unless you are as broke as can be.  If you bought something for $20 at Amazon I only receive 80 cents in the new commission rate ( this was the last payment under the old rate, so the $215 I just got will be far less next month ).  So if you bought a used book for a buck plus shipping, thank you but that is only four cents commission.  Try for a buck a month in my pocket.  If you can only buy one of my books, fine, thirty cents is better than nothing.  You know you want to support your favorite doomer author, who asks for very little and delivers so much.  I'll also try to just make snide comments once a month for donations.
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I don’t check out Creekmore’s site all that often-there just isn’t really ever that much there.  He’s a great guy, minimizes the BS he preaches ( which isn’t really dangerous advice, more generic than anything.  He does lean a bit too close to bible thumping for my taste but that is a preference ), but there just doesn’t seem to be a lot to read over there.  But I do check in occasionally, mostly when nobody else can be bothered to post.  You can scan a few weeks, see if there is an article to read.  There was a really good guest article “The Half-Way Prepper”.  The gist of it was that nobody can afford a concrete bunker up in the mountains and so you just do things half way instead all out insane.  You can’t move to Idaho, so you buy a few acres in Tennessee.  You can’t work from home as a consultant or programmer, so you get a job relatively close that is relatively secure.  You can’t afford a huge semi-auto arsenal so you have a good hunting rifle with plenty of ammunition.  This was great advice and a great article, but I noticed a troubling underlying theme as I read through the meaty article.  He wasn’t much of a prepper.

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Now, don’t get me wrong.  In the somewhat deluded fantasyland of rainbow crapping unicorns that Rawles and Creekmore dwell, you can be a prepper if you have a few months of food and a means of defense.  They call this preparedness because nobody else in the city is armed nor do they have but a weeks groceries in the cupboard.  This is their evangelical mission, bringing in those poor lost souls to the flock, everyone welcome just pull up a chair and listen to the  Preacher tell you how you can spend money to save your soul.  The more ears listening, the more purchases, the more advertising dollars.  You are welcome to their church if all you have is a case of MRE’s and a semi-automatic firearm ( which, in a pinch, can be substituted with a bolt action, but ONLY if it is in officially approved military caliber-but you are expected to get that super deluxe plastic poodle shooter post haste ).  All the Official Church Doctrine is of course spouted.  Concrete bunker, bug out bag, freeze dried foods, but like the Catholic Church which never turned away a sinner, ‘cause the collection plate needed filling, All Preppers Are Welcome regardless of levels of preparedness.  Hell, you can have nothing but a Rambo Survival Knife and a pack of seeds and as long as your heart is pure, as long as your intentions are noble, you are an automatic member. 

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I know I’m a bit harsh on advertiser sponsored preppers.  Just like when you watch free TV, you expect commercials.  What chaps my ass about TV shows is when they go out of their way to showcase the products during the show, THEN we still have to watch commercials.  If you are going to go slow-mo as your hero cop pulls out of the station, highlighting the grill Chevy bowtie or the Ford oval, THAT should be the damn commercial, damn your greedy hides all to hell, damn you!  You wonder why Netflix is so popular?  Car commercials are a special kind of putrid crap, and showing the car racing around the city is a better advertiser than an official commercial anyway.  You cheese dingus bastards already added 50% more commercials than when I was a kid, and now you want product placement also?  AND for me to pay for signal delivery? Well, as we just talked about previously, the survivalist product companies are in a world of hurt, as are the sites that fed off them.  It almost makes me believe in karma again.

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Again, free content equals the need to watch commercials.  YouTube seems to be doing okay with that ( although I haven’t paid attention to their financials lately ).  I get the fact that commercials were necessary on prepper sites.  What chaps my ass is when those sites do product placement.  An actor will drink a Coke during a TV show.  Repeatedly.  If he ever switched to water it would probably kill him.  But you can ignore that fact if you so choose.  When a prepper site writes an article with product placement, that crosses a line.  Then the site just becomes the advertisers bitch.  That would be like Coke insisting a grade school teacher told students water was poisonous or polluted or that sugar was an actual vitamin.  Do you see where I’m coming from?  When Prepper Expert A says that the ONLY gun you should own is a semi auto, he might believe his own bullspit.  Or, he might be attracting advertisers for ammunition, ammo magazines, FLIR scopes and gun periodicals.  That is why I hate advertised sites, because their credibility and motivation is questionable ( of course, as I’ve said, this isn’t an evil conspiracy.  Those advertisers seek out the writers already holding the views they endorse.  But the end results are the same ).

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In this case, what the advertisers are doing is moving the baseline of preparedness to near zero.  Because “growth” is the only business paradigm known, all your prepper companies, just like any other company selling any other product, need to grow to survive.  You have to pay for machinery and warehousing and of course advertising.  They operate in a closed system of debt and increased debt to reduce the old debt and needing more customers but getting into more debt still to service new customers.  To use a very basic example, if I was to become my own publisher-not that I would necessarily except to feed my ego rather than my wallet-I’d buy the computer equipment to high-speed copy CD discs and the means to print a professional cover on those CD’s.  Then I’d have inventory costs for mailing envelopes and CD covers and etc.  Then I’d keep mailing out free samplers to prepper sites, and give away copies to attract buzz.  Before I have one customer, I already need hundreds to pay my cost.  If I sell CD’s like I am now, just a replacement for Kindle books, a non-printed CD, my cost is zero and I can go months without a customer and not suffer. 

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That is the difference between customers to recoup cost and customers for the sake of customers.  Going by the number of loyal minions who support me by the sales of my old magazine as they were offered for sale, I think I can safely call my rabid financial supporters at about twenty to twenty-five.  I’ll double that to account for previous donors not wishing to pay again, and add fifty percent to account for recent growth in eyeballs ( the more other sites fail, the more readers my way-out of desperation only of course ).  75 supporters out of a thousand readers.  Above that amount, I just have an ego gratifying number of followers.  You wonder why I can’t have any expenses publishing?  If I tried to recoup costs I’d be out of business myself.  And, just spitballing here, because I’m so incredibly awesome ( shut up! ) I think my numbers are high.  More people love me because I’m the best ( perhaps not to the Grammar Nazi’s, but hump you too ), so I get extra support.  The companies out there advertising are probable only looking at a 1-3% response rate.  If that.

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So you need LOTS of readers to support the advertisers.  So you make believe that anybody with a pulse can be a potential reader/supporter.  You lower the bar so far that the ranks are filled.  If you were in the military you know exactly what I am talking about ( probably the same if you work for a large corporation.  Come to think of it, I’d imagine that the “hire too many, layoff some, double the workload to the survivors” paradigm is deliberate because there is always so much rank filling deadwood out there.  Of course, the incompetent lazy kiss asses survive, so the actual workers need to triple their work to account for the still there worthless ones ).  I think we could re-introduce my long ago mentioned 80/20 Rule ( not that I came up with the concept, I just think I was the first survivalist to mention it.  I think.  Don’t hold me to that ).  20% of your customers provide 80% of your revenue.  It is lower than that in actuality but it highlights the general idea that few folks subsidize the rest.  The 80/20 Rule is just shorthand for a general idea.  20% of criminals commit 80% of the crimes, or 20% of workers do 80% of the work, that sort of thing. 

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But I digress.  Here is my point.  Very few Preppers are actually preppers.  They are certainly not survivalists.  They are Pretty Pony Preppers, a few glittery sparkles conveying much and delivering little.  You cannot be prepped for a hurricane or power outage and think you will survive the collapse of civilization.  Which is seemingly what preppers believe for some bizarre reason.  Or, not so bizarre, if these sites they visit give that impression and being neophytes the readers believe them.  Remember, you gotta pack the pews, so don’t let any sinners get up and walk away.  Don’t insult them.  Tell them what they want to hear ( say three Hail Mary’s and you’ll go to heaven, repentant sinner ).  Tell them if they plant a pot on the porch with tomatoes they are a survivor.  Let me start dissecting the Half-Way Prepper’s preparations.  I understand any preps are better than nothing.  What I don’t understand is people being okay with that.

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First off, very important, Half Way Prepper ( HWP ) has a mortgage.  That would be okay if he had a fallback location, but his retreat is his home.  Quite simply, if your retreat is mortgaged, you don’t have a retreat.  You have a Pretty Pony.  It looks good, but for most scenarios of high probability it blows chunks.  It is okay to be stuck in a high density area working a crappy job, but it isn’t okay to count on that lasting.  Have that hunting cabin in the woods that is paid off.  You most likely won’t be bugging-in if the location is mortgaged.  I won’t go on and on about that, I’ll just leave it at that for now.  Next, food preps are marginal.  The soil sucks ( like most places.  Few focus on the fact most soil sucks most places due to historical fertility draw down.  You can own land, but if it is Southern clay, Rocky Mountain high acidic pine needle cover, dead desert, or similar, you have dirt, not soil.  Why did you pay THAT much for that land? ) at his location.  Yes, he is building it up.  Great.  Come the collapse he’ll be able to eat as much vegetables as he wants, at a whopping 200 calories a day.  That should be helpful. 

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You need storage food.  That really isn’t negotiable.  Since it can be 99% whole grains, it is too cheap not to have ( the rest of the food, the 1% most folks will have available in hunting, trapping, and gardening, makes the grain diet nutritious ).  If you don’t have years of grains, you aren’t really a candidate for survival.  HWP doesn’t focus exclusively on guns, so that is a good thing.  As long as you have ammo, the gun is incidental.  But his job is an hour commute a day.  And it is a government job.  How quick we forget 2009/2010 saw government budgets decimated.  It isn’t as secure as you think to work for those cheese dinguses.  And long commutes, seemingly pretty normal for most parts of the country, can be problematic unless you are a Fracking Fag.  Do we need to go over all that again?  Don’t piss me off, or we will.  If you have a mortgage, no place to go, only 3-6 months storage food, a job hanging on by a thread and a pathetic garden, how prepared are you?  Congratulations, you are “officially” a prepper.  But how long will you last outside of a natural disaster?  That generator you own brings MORE trouble, not less.  That was a waste of money that should have gone into food preps ( remember, your daily inflation food isn’t your collapse food-a generator doesn’t make it so.  I’ll discuss that another time ). 

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The point here is not the need to unzip and sling out our dingus and compare length and girth.  It is to warn you off complacency.  Thinking you are a prepper when you’re just a Pretty Pony is a scary example of hubris getting ready to kick you in the gonads, then squishing them like a grape while you are down for the count.  You can play pretend all you want, convincing yourself nothing bad will happen.  History, full of civilization collapses, calls you a dumbass.

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32 comments:

  1. To be fair, everyone should have a bug out bag. That's probably the first thing every new person should put together. All your necessities to sustain life for 72 hours that's instantly mobile, even if you think you have the ultimate retreat that you'll never have to leave...because you might.
    Peace out

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    1. I agree, but that is a strategy for a prepper with other arrangements. Getting a bug out bag doesn't make you a prepper.

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  2. I agree with you on the general picture, and especially on the constant need that Yuppie Preppers have in always trying to prove their credentials like teenagers comparing the length of their appendice.

    I am in the midst of reading "Deer Hunting With Jesus" by Joe Bageant , writen ten years ago by a 60-year old liberal that discovers how enstranged the Democrats have been with the reality of Working Class America.

    There is a chapter about guns and how liberals got it totally wrong, and how poor people are very reliant on them for survival. He gives the examples of women getting home after the night shift, or poor people walking home at night from the Landromat etc. and how having a gun is primarily dissuasive (they seldom have to use it) but very vital.

    I would like to complement this argument with an article by Massad Ayoob titled "Cheap Guns Are Good Enough" which displays what I would call BIC-approach-common-sense : http://www.backwoodshome.com/cheap-guns-are-good-enough/

    It seems those who NEED to have guns on a daily basis can't afford anything more than cheap Saturday Night Specials & Derringers, usually at a price under 200 dollars.

    My view is that most survivalists don't live in this kind of environment and are very glad for it, but fear that environment will come to them. As such, they fantasize a lot about this because they wouldn't want to gather real data on that environment - it would be toxic and somewhat suicidal. So it's like teenagers who tell stories about their uncle being a Navy Seal Marine or something.

    Where there is imagination there is advertisement, so we can't blame those companies to try and jump on that waggon (the Desillusion Waggon ;) ;) ).

    Yuppie Survivalists are also vague about the timing because usually they're not in contact with the population at large, unlike cops, nurses and teachers.

    Being a teacher I don't sense imminent dread but the sense that the chasm between social classes is widening and that Middle Class is not as much disappearing than getting more precarious and vulgar.

    Therefore there are actually few preppers among nurses, teachers and cops, most preppers are cublicle dwellers.

    That said, the first rule of survival is : "stay out of trouble". A task I give my pupils every year is to design the contents of a 48h backpack, and invariably they don't include a radio. In an emergency, they might head towards the danger with their perfect 48h kit on their back. This is something that is actually quite simple for them to grasp.

    Therefore, it doesn't matter what preps you have, if you're living in a city, like you explained, the whole point of survivability is moot. You might have zero preps and still live because you've relocated in the boonies, whereas even a hardened bunker in a city will eventually not save you (especially if something / somebody harmed you before you could even get there).

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    1. The Charlton Heston movie, where he is held up in town surrounded by zombies, goes shopping during the day, has cool submachineguns-that seems to be the defacto survival manual.

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    2. Skills and planning weigh nothing. A few items in your pockets are the first line of tools to fix small problems, then the daily carry bag, 30% body weight ruck march pack/bicycle panniers, car trunk boxes, truck packs, pickup truck camper, travel trailer, 28' RV, 52' sailboat, C-5 Galaxy and so on in an ever-widening weight-space-cost-maintenance profile of vehicles hopefully going somewhere. More-bigger-better increases the profile, so recruit security forces soon! Or, you can already be in the place of remote cheapness getting expert at living there. pdxr13

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    3. Motor vehicles, soon to be the new chariot, militarily.

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  3. Ok, what you are asking is fair, a dollar a month.. at the end of this year.. I will pony up :) but its going to be in Canadian dollars by paypal.. so its only going to be 77 cents on the dollar LOL but its still better then the amazon payout.

    So I had a chuckle today (I do most day's) I am a very pretty pony.. we are still paying off the farm.. at double time and more

    On the flip side, the rest.. well the rest is ongoing and going well

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    1. I think I'm most fair. And to keep cosmic brownie points rolling in, I even excuse the po'folk. Let my wisdom rain/reign.

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  4. Recent youtube policies demonetized all of their politically incorrect content. A short while later they were displaying the rainbow flag at the top left corner of their site in honor of “proud to take it up the pooper month”, so we know where their priorities lie.

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    1. Still not sure all of us listen when politicians open their sewer hole. Habit? Wishful thinking? Entertainment?

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    2. It still doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t see why any corporation would feel the need to go public with their political stance on an issue. Even if they were to support the views of the majority, they’re still alienating a large percentage of potential consumers. There has to be something else going on here that we’re not seeing, such as some type of huge corporate break for corporations that get onboard with this sort of thing (Hypothetical example; I have no idea, but I’ll bet I’m pretty close).

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    3. Look at Disney, with the Gay Pride thing-they were almost a pioneer. Why would a family profit business do such a thing? The school kids being brainwashed in the same deal, so kids wag that dog. But, yeh, why others?

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  5. I went and read the HWP article over at Creekmores's site. I actually thought it was pretty good.

    At least HWP is trying. Better than what most folks are doing.

    I get your point about how a societal collapse is coming and halfway prepping won't cut it. But for most bumps in the road, HWP should manage just fine.

    I figure life is all about bettering your odds. Every extra can of tuna, extra bag of wheat, extra bit of savings, makes your odds better. But no matter what you do, your odds will never reach 100%. Men plan, Gods laugh.

    Idaho Homesteader

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  6. I have never claimed to be a prepper. I am a survivalist. I have been surviving for almost 67 years so far and I figure if the whole world went to shit tomorrow I could make it for 10 more years with just my experience and grit. After that, who gives a shit.

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    1. I think a decade of apocalypse living would be plenty, at least to those transitioning over.

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  7. Dakota Drought Sparks Biggest Spring Wheat Price Spike In 7 Years

    by Tyler Durden
    Jun 30, 2017

    The price of your bagels and pizzas are about to rise as the cost of so-called 'aristocrat of wheat' - Hard red spring wheat - is exploding on the back of a worsening drought in the US High Plains.

    Futures soared as much as 8.5 percent on Thursday, the most intraday since 2010, after Canada cut its planting outlook and drought conditions expand in U.S. growing states. Prices are up 31 percent in June, beating the gains for 80 other commodities tracked by Bloomberg.

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-30/dakota-drought-sparks-biggest-spring-wheat-price-spike-7-years


    Idaho Homesteader

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    1. But by all means, keep hiding your head up your ass and don't buy. It isn't the point if one crop fails, it is if it goes global or if it happens two years in a row. If you can't buy red winter, buy white.

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    2. Was just talking to my farmer yesterday as I was getting a few things and he is looking for 250 a ton for good hard wheat

      So that's my going price at the moment, that's delivered in a big bag by the tractor and then I have to sort and store it properly.

      I put a order in for a few more ton's of grain to be heading my way soon.

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    3. Damn, you order wheat like it is by the little sack instead of the big one.

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    4. I guess I should own up that I buy Barley at a three to one rate to the other grains.

      Barley is my go to for soups, stews, sprouted, green crop, cut and drop green crop, fodder and so forth.

      Wheat.. that is for flour and sprouting.. the oats, well they are mainly for feed in some form or the other, be it rolled, fermented, sprouted or green cropped.

      I am very luck the farm came with good buildings and the room in them to store large amounts.

      On a interesting side note from one of the comments, we have a below ground cement cistern, just out in the one pasture. (maybe for milk products at some point or far enough away to not draw in the coy-wolf's?

      So a little ways from my big Barn (which is a goodly walk from the main farm yard, sits a older red shed, and when you go in.. half the shed is a big old cement cistern, its about two feet out of the ground with a nice wide two foot sitting edge and it goes down six feet and its four feet long in length and three feet wide.

      It came with a wooden slatted top, with a topper and a rope and turn handle, when you lift the top, there was a wooden board at the bottom tied off that you can lower and raise.

      I can only assume that it was used as a form of in ground fridge-cool space in summer in days gone by on the farm. I have tested it and I can use it as a clamp and it will not freeze roots at the bottom but I have never tried it as a ice house for in the summer but some day I guess I should.

      I have plans to take down the older in need of repair red shed and replace it with a well built one that is expanded some for other uses.

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  8. hello!
    just read 'raconteurreport.blogspot.com'

    'wally world weekend maths.
    check it out. ties in with your recent articles.
    excellent follow up comments, too.
    his only mistake was adding the wrong razors to the list.
    people seem to finally be getting the right end of the stick.
    this isn't something you do suddenly.
    as one of his commenters said, there is always some unforeseen thing. we can only go so far without the ability to see into the future.

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    1. Good article. I used to read him regularly, he did the ebola thing really well. But recently, too much politics so I stopped visiting.

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  9. soil--read years ago that charts of nutrients found in vegetables are based on old data before the soil was so depleted. probably vegetables these days are much less nutritious.
    looking forward to article on generators.
    one commentor on another blog spent his money on a 'cast iron burner' and a very large tank of propane.
    seems more useful than a generator unless you have to store insulin or run a breathing machine.
    waiting for enlightenment from you, of the glossy mane.

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    1. I haven't rushed into the generator article just because I need a bit more than just "it sucks, don't do it".

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    2. I think generators are a wonderful LUXURY item. We use one as a backup for our solar panels.

      I love, love, love my little Honda 2,000's. We have two tied together to make 4,000 watts. They are portable, fairly quiet and sip gas.

      They are wonderful little slaves that save me a lot of time of the homestead. Electricity really is a great thing.

      That being said I would never depend on anything mechanical, electrical, digital, etc. with the basic necessities that I need for life.

      Idaho Homesteader

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    3. Well said, but isn't "mechanical" too restricting? Wouldn't most things since the Stone Age be included? Just nitpicking.

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    4. Yeah, you're nitpicking ;)

      But isn't it smart to have backups for your backups? I can take it all the way down to primitive level if I have to.

      I call it stair step survival. We started pretty basic when we built the homestead. Every time we added a new luxury (went up a step), we kept the old way of doing it.

      For example, I originally got water from the pond, stream, barrel, and cistern with a bucket. Then I upgraded to a simple pitcher pump. Then I got a fancier pitcher pump. Now I have a 12 volt water pump. But guess what, I still have the bucket and the pitcher pump all ready to go. (The pitcher pump is still on the counter--hooked up.)

      Obviously, the higher up the technological level you can go, the easier and more comfortable you are. And of course, I will use whatever advantages I can.

      But when it comes to the basics of shelter, food, and water, the more you can keep it to caveman simplicity, the better off you are.

      Idaho Homesteader

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    5. No arguments here on simplicity. As long as I don't hear "stairstep collapse" :)

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    6. @ Idaho Homesteader re: "But isn't it smart to have backups for your backups?"

      This is a good question to ask. It could make for an excellent article.

      Your example is very good. The electric pump gives you superior performance and ease of use but many elements can break or stop to function (too old battery for instance), and the setup is more expensive. On the contrary, the bucket is inexpensive and very resistant, but it is inefficient in terms of time and energy.

      In theory it would make sense to accumulate all the inexpensive solutions first, then set up priorities for your more advanced items.

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    7. Right, most folks jump to the most complicated/expensive.

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    8. "In theory it would make sense to accumulate all the inexpensive solutions first, then set up priorities for your more advanced items."

      The other advantage to this approach is gratitude.

      Even after having a 12-volt pump for 16 years, I remember having to hand pump all my water for 5 years. Every time I take a shower, I am so appreciative of having running (and heated) water.

      But I also remember that it is a luxury that is dependent on technology.

      Idaho Homesteader

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