stuff runs out

STUFF RUNS OUT

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note: not updated for almost five years, but a really great effort at a blog on cheap trailer living.  click here
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Okay, I’d like to introduce my co-author for today’s article, Captain Obvious.  And he’s here to tell you that, surprise, stuff runs out.  No matter what you do, even extreme practices such as stashing ten years worth of wheat ( it’s not the cost-one and a half grand grain in buckets and Mylar-but more the digging or shelter requirements ), your stuff runs out.  If you are a Semi Simian,  tens of thousands of rounds still aren’t enough to keep you from running out ( semi tactics treat a thousand rounds like I would look at fifty for my bolt action Enfields, a long battle engagement.  Setting aside survivability of course-this is just logistics.  If you love your spray and pray and your covering fire, your bare minimum on ammo starts at twenty thousand rounds.  Even at bulk prices this is some serious lettuce.  And I wouldn’t even feel comfortable if I were you under fifty thousand.  Assuming your barrel wasn’t tapped out at ten thousand rounds, even steel case carbine rounds run you ten thousand bucks at this point.  Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just aim? Even paying more per round, bolt ammo totals so much less-$1800 for five thousand rounds, combined factory rounds and reload components ). 

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“Stuff runs out”.  Duh.  But this isn’t a contest to see who can afford the most stuff so he runs out last, which is just a retarded combination of the two games, side by side dingus measurement and He Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins.  What you need to be worried about is not who is richest but about who plans the best for when stuff runs out.  Look, almost none of us employed is really truly poor.  Sweet Baby Jesus On A Tire Swing, fifteen grand a year is minimum wage.  You think that isn’t much but that is because you are STILL blinded by the cultural insistence on being a lazy rich bastard, or at least appearing as if you are one.  And who does that mostly benefit?  The bankers.  Those insatiably greedy twats have their demon shaped thumbs in every pie and yearly work the politicians to grant them yet even more monopolies and profits.  Okay, granted, prior to 2005/8 there was enough surplus that their greed and avarice was a mere Protection Racket amount easily absorbed as the cost of doing business.  For a small token amount, say thirty percent or thereabouts in mostly hidden amounts ( the inflation tax alone was around seven to ten percent ), we enjoyed the benefits of Imperial Control.  Subsidized oil was just the more obvious benefit, but there were plenty of others in all commodity forms.  $10 footwear or a sheet of plywood are clearly the results of cheap oil and globalization ( well, they cost more than that in unemployment costs, but we shan’t go into that ), not some other fabled unicorn rainbow feces such as Economics Of Scale, Innovation or other claptrap. 

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Yet since 2008, which was the real estate bubble bursting sunrise to the 2005 Global Peak Conventional Oil sunset, the bankers are no longer even trying to pretend to share in the wealth and insist on smacking the rag covered proletariat aside in their scramble for the last of the crumbs.  We’ve really only suffered for the last ten years, out of the last hundred ( setting aside the First Great Depression for the moment as that was more Elite Combat induced, rather than Resource Contraction as we see today ), for all intents and purposes ( resource contraction since the mid 1960’s to 2007 is not the same as the ‘07 to now exponential implosion.  Before, you had time to adjust.  Now, the boat is on the lip of the waterfall and your time is about up ).  We are currently in the same situation as the Roman peasants mere years from the barbarians storming the city, the elite squeezing the blood from stones so unrelenting that destitution and death are the future for the 99%.  Back then the Senatorial powers taxed the farmers into abandonment ( even if the land had long been played out ), and now the bankers insist on so much of your paycheck between rent and medical insurance ( insurance, not coverage ) alone that most incomes don’t cover even that, let alone food and other incidentals.  Add the overpopulation from uninhibited immigration stressing our food supply and you can see how this can won’t be kicked too much further down the road. 

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But all that is only seemingly hopeless if you agree to play by their rules.  If you are a chump, a sucker, a rube, distracted by pretty ponies and shiny objects, making the mental bars of your self imposed prison unbreakable ( oh, all my family is here.  Oh, my wife wouldn’t approve ), then a minimum wage job ain’t dingus.  But if you can give up your auto, and rent or a mortgage, and understand that doctors are today far more incompetent than yourself with self diagnosis and treatment, fifteen grand is a Gott Damn Humping Bloody fortune!  On that money you could stockpile the Oil Age Industrial Economy once in a species goldmine objects such as that mechanized wheat, petrochemical plastics and insulation, abundant glass and ceramic and ammunition and etcetera.  You only run into limitations when you try to live in banker profiting luxury AND try to stockpile.  One or the other, folks.  Time is short.  If you don’t see that, if you think this is just another 1970’s or Y2K false alarm, you might as well not even try.  Just wallow in decadence and eat, drink and be merry for soon you die.

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You might as well just be a Prepper Pussy or a Disaster Doomer.  Just lots of guns, little ammunition and less food.  But you’re a prepper by gum!  You have a bucket of dried food that will feed five people for a week!  Well, at least they get three “servings” a day, a total of a hundred and fifty calories each and every whole day!  I trust I don’t have to elaborate on my sarcasm there.  But to return to stuff, the cheaper you live the more preps you’ll have, and the more preps you have the longer before your Stuff Runs Out.  But you not only need to have the right stuff, you need to also have the right replacement plan.  We’ve talked plenty prior to the Right Stuff to have, so let’s move on to what to do when the stuff runs out.  You need a plan to replace all your stuff, even if you can maximize the time to the demise.  The Forever Gun, the five to ten years of wheat, that is pushing your supplies out as far as possible.  But not all replacement plans are equal.  For instance, the universal insistence on gardening.  This is a great skill to have, in and of itself, but pretty much blows mule member in an apocalypse.  Gardening is not farming.  The centerfold Playboy Bunnies of the prepper universe showing off their huge gardens, all their YouTube Subscribers sporting wood over the images?  If you were a rabbit preparing for the collapse, you would survive nicely.  If you are a person?  Not so much. 

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I’m going to name names here and while I don’t mean it as a hateful tirade but merely illustrative, it is still hard to hide how retarded this is.  “Prepper Princess” on YouTube is showing how she could conceivable live on $100 a year spending for food.  She gets “free” eggs and some oranges, as well as a few veggies trash picked.  The food was on top of a card table with room left over, and besides being treated to ONE whole chicken drumstick a WEEK!!!, she was planning on ONE small bag of rice lasting that year.  How many calories do you think she was planning on ingesting?  Not a thousand a day would be my guess ( there was another idiotic video on a guy with fifty bucks in rice claiming that was a years survival stockpile-I didn’t stick around long enough to record his handle, which should have been Dumbass Doomer ), probably a lot less and if in fact this was all she was eating my only guess as to how she is still alive is she drinks a gallon of soda a day for calories ( of course, to be fair, some people actually are able to live on an amount of calories that modern scientists argue is impossible-so there is that.  Still, a regular person is going to die on this ).  But looking at all the freeze dried fruit and the dessert treats and their small gardens, I’m sure it is safe to say that no one has much of a clue what they need to actually survive without a supermarket.  Hell, my wheat only bare bones emergency diet isn’t really all that realistic long term, and I’m presenting more calories than most!

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Everybody gets all sexually aroused since they have a garden.  Oh, look at me, I’m a gardener so I can’t die after the collapse even if I don’t store much food!  Oh, you’ll die all right, but with healthy skin and shiny hair, from all the vitamins you got from your garden produce.  The calories to keep you alive, well, they were in that storage food you didn’t have.  Again, I’m not saying gardening isn’t a great skill to have.  In the worsening economic collapse being able to garden and provide those vitamins and few extra calories will help you survive malnutrition as our centralized food supply breaks down.  But for AFTER the waterfall collapse?  No, gardening will kill you.  All these prepper experts telling you that if you live in an apartment but can plant a tomato in a few pots on the patio, implying that is a great start at replacing food, they are idiots selling false hope.  Gardening is a collapse skill, farming is a post-collapse skill.  Both are needed, but the lesser will not substitute.  Gardening is a poor plan as replacement calories go, yet it is most of what is recommended.  Hunting and trapping won’t work well because of competition, and gardening lacks calories.  Next idea?

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You need enough storage food to get you through the die-off AND through your training period in food procurement.  And, yes, I realize wheat only is problematic in delivering calories while learning another way of providing food.  You’ll almost need to double down on your daily consumption to do that.  So, keep in mind, that super three year wheat stash just shrunk to one and a half.  That means you get through the die-off and have exactly ONE crop that must succeed.  Five years is better, as a minimum.  You must realize that gardening is just as problematic.  If it takes you several seasons to learn the soil and pests for certain produce, why would you think that seamlessly translates over to another crop in a nearby location?  You’re going from produce in the backyard to grain in a location with the acreage it needs.  Let me spell this out clearly.  Christian Militia, Prepper Pussies, Pretty Pony Preppers, Disaster Doomers, all the commercialized luxury laden “survivalist posers” who don’t have multi-years of calories to get them through on the job training for food replacement with its failures, stand zero chance of survival. 

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You don’t have a chance if your replacements are too pie in the sky.  Gaining new skills now is fine, as long as they are directly translatable.  If they are too fanciful, such as “I’ve got a book on making your own flintlock rifles” to replace an ammo gulping semi, they won’t work, not if you wait until you are out of ammo.  Not that there is anything wrong with book only plans.  As long as you have the supplies to see you through the book learning and trial and error translation into real life.  When folks get angry at you when you just stock seeds, rather than learn how to garden, they end up sounding superior and educated but never question if the actual gardening skill is transferable into the post-apocalypse period.  Just like they never question the long term viability of chainsaws ( which I only bring up to cheese off certain minions, just as I delight in riling up those with AR’s.  I’m funning here, folks!  Relax ).  I may or may not continue this at a later date.  I’m not sure of I could expand much from here.  Or, I might just incorporate it into another subject.  We’ll see.

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