Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump
MangoCats@feddit.it 3 days agoWe can start growing our own food within weeks, not reliant on ancestors
Having watched a neighbor “farming commune” with 12-15 adults on 80 acres who had nothing better to do than play Gilligan’s Island building their huts and trying to grow their own food, for two years with full internet access, enough money for tools and fertilizers, electric pumps for irrigation, they seemed to shy away from using the tractor in the field to work the crops but they had a working tractor… after two years they were only growing about half of their calories.
In other words, In my opinion a “real prepper” already has a “Victory Garden” going and producing enough food that they can easily scale it up to meet 200% of their calorie needs, some to store for hard times, some to barter. If you haven’t actually done that, you’re probably in for a surprise when the raccoons eat your crops in the middle of the night.
All that time can be used to make hard copies of essential information.
If you have a working printer, toner, paper… and don’t forget: a laser printer uses more than10x as much power as an efficient computer. A couple of years would be required just to figure out what you think might be essential information, and after the printer dies you’ll find new essential things based on changes in your situation.
Having said all that, yeah, I’ve got the big offline copy of Wikipedia setup with a reader on a laptop…
You can learn how to salvage wire and build new energy sources. An average 2100²ft empty house has almost 200 pounds of copper wire in the walls. 3000 cycles to learn.
This will the the real resource people use for probably 50+ years after TSHTF - scavenging from what’s left over. As you say: 90%+ dead by next Spring, that leaves a LOT of empty houses to scavenge. Food won’t be there, but wire in the walls, lumber to burn for heat, glass, water pipes, there will be used mattresses available for decades.
thanks for telling me who I am and what skills I already have.
Speaking in general about the 10% who do survive the first three months, the skills required to make it through that chaos are very different from the sustained scavenger/farmer phase.
FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I’m only going to focus on one part because it shows the disconnect between you and I.
Who said anything about a printer? I said hard copy. Not printout. Write it down. Carve it into rock or shape it in clay. 3000 cycles and you keep limiting yourself. That 200 pounds of copper wire could be pounded flat and marked with a sharp tool to create a long lasting hard copy. So many options for a hard copy and you defaulted to the one option we can’t even get to work when everything is working.
MangoCats@feddit.it 3 days ago
I hear you, but especially in scavenger mode, even pounded flat copper sheets aren’t going to have the capacity to store the wiring diagram for an EV you find that you want to fix up and rig for solar charging. Particularly when you don’t know which year or model of thing it is you’re going to be wanting to scavenge.
While I agree that laser printers are finicky, once I get one working if I have enough paper I can generally print until I run out of toner. And printed paper isn’t forever, but I do have laser printouts from 40 years ago that are as legible as they ever were.
Where I disconnect with you is: why even bother with Terabytes of knowledge when you’re just going to collect the “most important” 100kB or so on your copper sheets at a rate of one sheet per hour, or less? There’s a reason Moses only had ten commandments instead of the full Talmud.