Wednesday, February 15, 2017

prioritize lifeboat items part 1


PRIORITIZE LIFEBOAT ITEMS
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I cannot vouch for them, so proceed at your own risk, but this does look interesting as a cheap water well drill:
http://howtodrillawell.com/
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Prepping for Y2K ( to mostly include research, except for a single period one year prior when I saw increased pay and put a LOT of money into supplies ) I was finally able to abandon my previous Mormon/’50’s Fallout Shelter inspired limited stockpile and begin to think about systems wide collapse instead of the localized immediate survival preps of limited utility ( which assumed a rapid recovery no matter the event.  I actually woke up, smelled the rancid future and assumed real world reality rather than prepper/militia fantasy was the nightscape to come-I don’t know what reading prompted this reversal of nearly twenty years of dogma, but I’ll just credit Gary North for his public service work here ).  I went from a home centric to civilization centric view.  After that, things got a lot easier on the frugal front, because not only did I abandon a lot of unnecessary preps ( why stock propane or propane accessories if the wells will forever more stop pumping?  Why stock semi-auto’s if no ammunition will ever again be made?  Why worry about precious metals if trade will never exist in my lifetime as the Dark Ages will last forty plus generations? ), the number of things needed also declined.

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If our future is brutish and short, luxury items and expensive toys are certainly not very important.  Just as a cancer patient knows he has very few months left to plan and prep for his families future, and on very limited funds, so too must you view the oncoming collapse as an impetus to get the hell off your ass and quickly see to the very basics.  You can’t time the collapse, and there is nothing saying it will happen tomorrow.  Yet at the same time there is nothing saying you still have five or ten or twenty years cushion ahead.  So you prioritize what is the most important and what needs immediate attention.  You are in effect just notified that a forest fire will be at your front door in twenty minutes.  You need fifteen of those in driving time.  What do you grab?  The house will burn, so you must prioritize those items that cannot be replaced.  In our case, you are at the end of the Oil Age ( as analyzed ad nauseam already, it is patently obvious that the Industrial Age has already taken a Big Squishy ) and there is a limited amount of time to grab those items that only the Petroleum Industry can provide.

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Again, we’ve talked about this many times before.  But if you are looking at this from a limited time collapse event you aren’t grasping the finality of oil and all it provides.  We have already seen the end of cheap and energy rich oil, over ten years ago.  Since then more and more of our oil is dirty and returns very little in the way of net energy, and a lot of it isn’t even REAL oil but substitutes such as tar sands.  Over FIFTY years ago we saw Peak Discovery ( ever since then we discover less and less new oil, and for some time now we are discovering even less than what we are using, AND all discoveries are of smaller and smaller reserves ).  Yes, Virginia, the age of oil is winding down.  Already as a nation we are abandoning one petroleum rich activity/item after another to compensate.  That is what the race to the bottom quality wise is about.  From manufacturing jobs to service.  From metal to plastic.  From gas guzzlers to Batteries On Wheels.  From warehouses to JIT.  From houses to Black Mold Boxes.  From higher education to PC Indoctrination institutions.  From cash for advanced medical to lifetime debt from lawyer proof tests and symptom masking drugs.  From nutrition to Frankenfood.

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NOW is the time to stockpile oil age products.  While they are cheap and available.  Just like oil ten years ago.  Now, while they are of marginally useful quality.  You want to wait for wheat to go total GMO like corn has, before you buy any?  Or how about you wait for it to experience shortages like rice did six/seven years ago?  Does that sound like a valid strategy?  You should maybe wait for another global heat wave and crop failure before you buy?  What’s the matter for you ( sorry, almost through the seasons of The Soprano’s-I’m starting to think in YankeeSpeak )?  Shortages, quality decline and higher prices are all indicative of an item on the Endangered Species List ( rice will never stop being grown, but cheap and abundant rice is another matter.  Or, look at lentils.  They used to barely be more than grain in price.  Now, after eight years, they just keep going up in price ).  You want expensive food?  Smallholders will always be able to plow a field with mules and produce grain and ship it by wagon.  For half of your wages you can still eat, just like most of the Third World in slums must do.  They are not allowed to farm the countryside, as those areas are for commodities to export-not for the local population.  Wait for sea trade to stop and see the many revolts and revolutions.  Right in the spot you retired to in your tropical paradise.  You want to go to Panama or Guiana to avoid the collapse?  It will follow you there.  Just get some swamp land in Florida or Louisiana ( with a boat to survive the floods ) if you want to avoid freezing weather.  It will be safer. 

( moving to a foreign country to Survive And Thrive?  Too much money has made your brain go soft.  You want way too much crime, a language you can’t understand, high prices to live in a ghetto, tropical diseases, gun control while surrounded by enemies and deadly revolution in the near future?  Just move to New Orleans ) 

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Since you can’t time the collapse you must assume tomorrow is BSD ( Big Squishy Day ).  So what must you grab for your lifeboat items?  Obviously, mechanized petroleum input grains.  Lots and lots of grains.  Plastic storage containers for grains.  And grain grinders.  None of these can be duplicated ( right now, a YEARS worth of grain is 1/10th your monthly income.  In the near future, one MONTHS worth will be between ½ and ¾ of your monthly income, if indeed you have an income.  All that stored silver wasted on food when you could have simply stockpiled it cheaply now.  $100 now, $8,000 tomorrow.  That is a heck of a good return on investment ).  Continued tomorrow.

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11 comments:

  1. Too true. I have been slacking on the grain/bean and bullet buying front dedicating more money toward the building of places to store the self and preps and band-aids to help the pains that building so late in life can bring. But I am starting to step it up a little again. Walmart sells mail order pre-packaged buckets of wheat, rice, and other such basics for between $12 and $25 per bucket. Each bucket is nearly a month of food per person. So for $100 max, plus shipping, you can (mostly) feed your family of 4 post crash for a month. A year for under $1200 if you are too lazy or busy to buy it cheaper and pack it yourself.
    Come ON! if you don't have 12 buckets per person in your family you are planning to DIE.
    Sure some people think they just need ammo and will kill someone who has food and take theres, well, most people have similar plans so you are going to have to fight those others with similar plans THEN you are going to have to succeed against the person who got the food and a little bit of ammo. And once their food is gone (guess what, I and others have hidden much of the food so that you wont get any more than a little, even if I cant use or destroy it first!) so you will have to hunt for more food, and succeed again the combats that brings, over and over again. I only have to win a couple of times as a prepared defender until the upreppared agressors starve to death as an unprepared agressor you would have to win repeatedly. Guess who has the better odds of surviving?
    And I placed myself so far out from everyone else that the chances of you finding my place, and closing in on it undetected are almost nil.
    I have enough ammo to put 2 bullets into everyone in this county if it were needed. But around here no one would even consider my stockpile worth taking - the granaries are here and have multi years worth of grain for the whole county.
    So what lazy idiots are out there that cant spend the money now to get a couple years worth of food delivered to their doors?!?
    Dont think you have room? the buckets are about 1 cubic foot, which means they fit nicely into the back of a closet, under a bed, or stacked and covered with sheets in place of a night stand and side table. There is NO excuse for not having multiples of the FEMA and Red Cross recommendations, or better, multiple of the LDS churches recommendations.
    Don't think you can live on just that stuff? you are probably right, you will have to supplement with foraging, hunting, gardening, trade, etc. But it will be supplemental, you have a bad day or week of getting food you wont starve to death if you have preps. If you have a good harvest your preps will last that much longer.
    Sorry if I seem to be ranting. I have about 48 buckets currently for my family of 3, and haven't been getting more recently so I am a little mad at myself too. But the nice thing is walmart still delivers and I am friends with a couple of farmers and ranchers locally.

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    1. If you are chastising yourself for failing to stockpile, while living in grain country, than I can't imagine your priorities are off. You seem to be of an acceptable level of paranoia. In your neck of the woods, building for an off grid winter living is also very important. Hard to eat any storage food if you are frozen to death. Plus, understandably, you must build to wife/family specifications. A necessary price to be living out there.

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    2. Yep spouse / family specifications are necessary to meet. The good news is that they are willing to help as much as they can and live much more simply than any typical urbanite - they (and I) still want our internet though, that will be our biggest expense once we get to the land, followed by propane for easy heating, though we intend to have back up wood heat and cooking. Other wise we hope to grow some (hopefully ,although unlikely, all) of our food, provide for shelter without any rent except minimal property taxes, etc.
      The best deal in the world fell into our laps last year when we got @ 300 sheets of 4x8 styrofoam insulation for the cost of going to get them - they were a days drive away so it wasn't totally free, but oddly no one closer was willing to get them all.
      I expect our small house will end up being well insulated in the end, along with the planned greenhouses, cistern, garage/shop, etc.

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    3. Okay, you are out in front of the Canadian Express, so I was never envious of your location. 300 sheets of insulation, NOW I'm jealous.

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  2. I'm willing to bet that most people wouldn't know what to do with the wheat berries. There _is_ a learning curve plus the vast majority of people have lost the art of cooking thanks to Frankenfood

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    1. People have lost the art of cooking due to pure laziness. The robots do the cooking. Automation is the culprit.

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  3. Yeah Louisisana ! Natural moats.

    A great survivalist novel, Glasses & Pulleys, takes place there ;)

    http://solsysbooks.blogspot.com/2013/04/e-reader-formats.html

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    1. You guys have read this, I hope.

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    2. When i started reading it, it was Unfinished, and he would release a few Chapters at a time, and then i dropped off.
      But at least it is a Collapse book, and not just Militia Porn (though there is enough gunplay and blowing shit up to keep that side happy).
      The main issues i have are that it is written by a German who speaks German, and English as a Second Language, so the writing can but a bit difficult, in places.
      BUT THE DAMN BOOK IS FREE, so if you complain about it you are missing the point...
      It is a free "post Collapse" book that hits on most of the Problems with trying to "Buy or Engineer" your way out of the problems we face.
      -eviltwin

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  4. Ok! As for the oil thing. I did some looking over the EIA US oil prod. numbers and I am starting to see a few trends. It appears we went up in production in Oct 2005, do mostly to fracking. My question is what has conventional oil production done since then, I would assume it has continued to decline even as the fracking side has increased. Which begs the question where are we in the conventional side? Id say fracking has masked that decline. Looking further at the numbers ( EIA field production chart)we see another topping in Apr2015, only 10 years since the increase started. Over the past 18 mths there has been a 1 million a day decrease. Enough time has not passed to see if the trend sticks, but, IF it does, the end is very near. I have more in depth numbers if anyone wants to see them. Disclaimer: I am a casual onlooker with no professional experience, just using data I have, so feel free to dispute the info. Peace

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    1. Your govt. numbers most likely are fudged. For instance, oil is imported in, refined, then exported back out. The govt. calls that part of production. So, things are likely worse than reported.

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