eating gold and skills

EATING GOLD AND SKILLS

You cannot eat gold.  It doesn’t mean “don’t bother with gold”, it means that gold is at the bottom of your priority list and it serves a completely different task than surviving the collapse ( silver is another animal.  I’m telling you, you could do a lot worse than just taking a wild bet and investing $20-$100 in silver bullion and waiting for it to exceed gold in price-it costs so little and can return so much ).  It is a generational transfer of wealth and has nothing to do with survival.  Gold is great, but it isn’t a talisman.

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It is the same when stockpiling carbon fuels.  They are great, but they don’t help you survive, per se.  They are a gateway fuel, getting you to the point where you can live completely on renewables.  For our purposes here we include Industrial Age items only feasible by squandering excessive carbon fuels, such as pane glass and insulation.  I’d rather invest in south facing windows ( that is your north, Dingo ) and more insulation than a large tank of propane.  If you JUST stock the carbon fuels, you quickly run out and have nothing. 

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You need both, but one lasts longer than the other and so is a better investment, should you be of a budget that only allows one.  When people see gold as a survival item, they assume that things will only get as bad as they desire ( trade will be possible even as people go hungry? ).  When they desperately stock gasoline and propane, they assume that things will only be bad for as long as they desire.  This is, in effect, prophesizing doom to a level you are comfortable with.  I can understand, being from a milk and honey land.

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But I haven’t seen too much evidence lately that things are still looking all that great for the majority of working folk, anywhere in the world.  If things just keep getting worse, where is the justification that we are still living in energy and financial surplus?  I know, some folks pretend that with “their” politician in power all will return to Unicorn Comfortable.  This is a message beat into our heads constantly.  You know, how finding a better husband ( RomCom movies ), a better job or a better warband leader ( The Walking Dead ) will make everything better again. 

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We obsess over Better, but it isn’t something you can rely on other people for.  Other people are looking for Better, also, and it is rare for the twain to meet.  I’m not suggesting fatalism or nihilism, just that one’s goals and aspirations need to be better grounded in realism.  You must push for personal greatness, but don’t think you can build a better mousetrap and get rich, in a crashing economy.  Yes, in the past, you could.  Past Depressions are zero indicator for future performance.  The last Depression was at the birth of the Oil Age.

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Not the end.  The last Depression was ( aside from any “push off the cliff” given by the central bank to eliminate all independent banks-why do you think gold was made illegal? ) about overproduction and resource abundance.  This Depression is about overproduction and LACK of resources ( we are scrapping the bottom of the barrel for them to keep producing ).  This Depression marks the end of the five century European colonialization of the globe.  You cannot offer what people cannot buy when there are no resources to do so.  That is a Full Stop, Period.

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And this is where people get skills confused.  They think that if they build it, they will come.  They confuse need and ability.  I don’t care how much mad skills you have.  If there is no food to give to you, your skills are useless.  Okay, here is an example.  A supervolcano blows.  A year on, you are having difficulty with too much exertion, as your lungs were impacted by breathing in particles ( despite your best efforts ).  A doctor comes along.  He can, after a few months, cook up some medicine to cure you.

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( yes, I know this isn’t a “thing”.  I’m making a point here ) But you have just enough food left to get you through a harvest in your greenhouse.  If you feed the doctor, you won’t make it that far.  So what do you do?  You don’t cure your breathing difficulty, that is for sure.  Yet, every single asinine story you read about the end of the world, people are going out of their way to find a doctor to come join their group, regardless of their food storage situation ( “I know we don’t have enough, but we’ll figure something out” ).

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Perhaps we should blame the book “Lucifer’s Hammer”.  Rather than reading non-fiction books on the fields relating to survivalism, PA authors read Hammer and think they are now qualified to perform an anal delivery of a novel.  What they seem to have missed is the background information in Lucifer’s Hammer, how they planned on feeding themselves.  These new writers keep the “needed skills” part and ignore the “feeding everyone” aspect.  If Food Is First, and everything follows, you simply cannot make the mistake of thinking gold, guns, carbon fuels or skills are Job One.

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“But, they NEED a doctor.  Any group will be lucky to have me”.  Have you met any fellow preppers?  They have a month of food.  They insist on meat every day, because, ‘Muricans.  Even you my beloved and far too abused minions don’t have enough food, even if far better prepared than the Yuppie Scum preppers.  Having a garden is great.  It is super.  Hell, my desert dwelling ass is jealous.  But it isn’t food.  It is a food promissory note.  Yes, you need both.  But you cannot neglect storage food and pretend that a garden is an adequate substitute.  Eventually it will be.

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But for now, it is a food casino.  You flip the coin, and it MIGHT deliver food.  But then, it might not.  No one goes from even good conditioned soil to Enough Calories in just one season.  You must always have enough stockpiled in case of harvest failure.  You cannot control the weather, pests, or bandits raiding.  Optimistic Ollie’s do NOT survive the apocalypse.  At most, they can be stewpot fodder or soil conditioning for the next generation.  Dark Age survivors understood how primary food was.  They did absolutely nothing that jeopardized the harvest, regardless of some perceived future benefit.

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One in the hand is better than two in the bush.  When the food supply was always one bad weather event away from being in deficit, you NEVER gambled with that lack of surplus.  We THINK we can do that today, because we really have no idea what it is like to be hungry.  We are also idiots.  If we really understood the importance of food, we would already have nuked the middle east for our energy supply and  genocided all the illegal aliens and the politicians who approved them ( because overpopulation ). 

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Continued tomorrow.

( .Y. )

( today's related link https://amzn.to/2VS5S0C )

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note: if you have been ignoring me lo these many years as I've tried to warn you about the Mosin-Nagant with its lack of a gas safety, here is the Forgotten Weapons dude touching on the importance of such a safety as he discusses the Gewehr 98 click here.  And yes, it is still important with low quality Russian ( or especially, Soviet ) ammo or when you start to use improvised chemicals for reloading.
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