Technology

I love seeing all the tacticool "operators" with their tricked out ARs, bulletproof vests and helmets, flexicuffs, and other shit but look like they get gassed slowly ascending the stairs from their mother's basement. Rule #1 in the zombie apocalypse is Cardio.

Also society isn't going to collapse overnight. If it does it will be a slow crawl until going full Gravy Seal is warranted. They need to survive until then.

I think you're overlooking a more likely (and more reasonable) approach preppers take; become skilled in various survival-oriented skills and then if things go south you can go to one of those farms and offer to help out in exchange for some of the food. The lone rambo raider types aren't going to last long, humans are social animals that do best in tribes and for the most part want to form tribes.

Preemptively apocalypsing yourself by forcing yourself to live in some sort of self-sufficient compound right now isn't reasonable for most people, but having some plans and resources in your back pocket in case of disaster is not at all unreasonable.

If nothing else, it makes camping more fun and lets you ride out a power outage or local disaster in style.

The overlap between climate crisis deniers and preppers is so large it‘s truly baffling. If you ask me most of them are just hobbyists who act a little too seriously about their little passion. It‘s a lot of make believe and very little obtaining practical skills.

the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.

They feel helpless to change the current course of events, and they're not far wrong as individuals.

What they also underestimate is how quickly they're gonna die when somebody decides they should after TSHTF. All the prepping in the world isn't gonna make living after a 20MT strike 20 miles away any fun at all. Living out in the boonies growing your own food? Whatever arsenal you have to protect it, all it takes is a band of yahoos with twice your numbers and firepower and your toast becomes their toast.

live in a fricking farming commune in the first place

Surprisingly difficult to do... we had a farming commune as neighbors for a couple of years, they never did reach food self sufficiency with 80 acres of fertile land and 16 people to work it. The Amish come close to making it work, but any Amish I have ever gotten to know tend to cheat, a lot.

Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.

Yeah, they trust the "scientists" even less than you trust their politicians - and they're not 100% wrong, just mostly wrong.

Don't get me wrong: true science is the way to make progress, and we have built a lot on science in the past 200 years or so, but we have also got a lot of bought and paid for business tools running around in lab coats fooling the science community that they are just like them.

Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.

Disasters of my lifetime have been hurricanes. If you can hunker down for the storm and retain your ability to drive out of the devastation zone after the roads are cleared (usually in a couple of days), you're good. Keep enough gas to run the generators until you can get more gas, keep enough food to last until you can get to a source of more. I've never had to abandon home, even with some pretty hard direct hits, but when it's bad enough that's what you do. Go somewhere that hasn't been whacked.

If we politically screw up the whole planet, that's harder to prep for than a mild nuclear winter.

Most preppers are of the "fuck society, I am the most important part of it" mentality, whether they're aware of it or not.

When shit hits the fan and the urban civilizations collapse, it's the old nomads that'll survive (if they haven't been killed off entirely by then)

Go get it directly from Kiwix

Just check under homework.

Kiwix.org

Download the App, and you can then download a full backup of Wikipedia, PHP Manuals, the "Survival Library", Ted Talks, FEMA guides, etc.

I considered the cost of the hardware and the time I would spend getting it all configured, then collecting the content from various sources.

Ultimately decided that $189 was worth it. I already have too many WIPs and something like this has been sitting on my ToDo list for years already, this is a great shortcut

I remember when offline backups that were unaffected by EMP were everywhere.

They called them books.

Solar generators exist, and are relatively inexpensive for smaller units.

As someone who is generally on the more prepared side, the use case for most stuff falls far short of "doomsday". There is a ton to be said about things that are just generally useful in adverse situations. I've lived through a dozen or so storms that took out power for a few days (longest I think was 2 weeks). It's usually not a complete blackout everywhere.

Point being: I can see it being useful to have a bunch of info in something easily portable to say, double check breaker wiring helping your friend fix some stuff after the storm. Look up the emergency AM/CB/NOAA radio freqs. I have a lot of the resources on this thing on a server, but that's not mobile and would eat a lot of power just booting up. To package it nicely in a form factor like this would probably run me just about $189.

But the overall point is I think this falls on the extreme end of practical preparedness but I can absolutely see the use. Honestly the most practical thing on there are the books. Again, usually if a community gets hit bad you wind up with people that have power having a bunch of people stay over. Being able to allow multiple people stuff to read would help kill time.

All of that being said, its a distant second to the critical items that, again, have a huge range of uses: A solid first aide kit, 2 weeks of food (even if it's not awesome). I realize that's a luxury for a lot of people, but money is much better spent there first.

Strayed off topic a bit, but it's because while I don't think it makes a lot of sense to plan for SHTF scenarios, I do think we're going to see a general decay (but not elimination) of public services/utilities and an increasingly pissy climate. I think it's important for people to not fall into the bunker-prepper fantasy OR write off being more prepared than they're accustomed to.

EMPs are overrated by Hollywood, who like to show sparks and electrical arcs and robots exploding and whatnot. In reality EMPs are mainly a threat to the power grid, because they operate by inducing an electrical current in a conductor and the longer the conductor is the more powerful the induced current is. Power transmission lines are thousands of kilometers long, they'll build up fearsome currents and fry stuff plugged into them (assuming circuit breakers and fuses don't manage to protect it). But a device like this has wires a few centimeters long, so they don't pick up nearly as much as long as they're not plugged in. They're more delicate, sure, but I like my odds.

An EMP can also be shielded against by a wrapping of tinfoil, as mentioned below. As long as there aren't large gaps (no, tinfoil hats don't work) it acts as a simple farraday cage. So if you really want extra protection keep this in a metal box. Assuming its case isn't metallic to begin with.

Wrap em in foil. Boom protected. But kinda moot if there's no power.

That doesn't take much power, a solar panel or two should be more than sufficient, or you can rig something up w/ a defunct ebike (just run the motor backwards to generate electricity).