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Long, long read

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Series of reports from the front line about what things are like when a national economy in our age collapses, half or more of the population, including children, is out to take anything not bolted down, and how your circumstances might look if it happens here.

http://members.cox.net/theprof/UrbanSurvival/Thoughts%20On%20Urban%20Survival.htm

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by boxfiddler

but it's remarkable. Strikes at the heart of life.

Any nation, any day now, could be an Argentina. Or worse.

Thank you.

by boxfiddler

Jewelry as much as pure coinage. Wouldn't have occurred to me. I'd guess the same applies to silver.

by boxfiddler

the NYC garbage strike of 2006.

I'd often thought before then that we were in deep if anything happened. That brought it to my attention in lasting fashion. Took up composting. Still working on it.

That track leads down the sewage path, too. Geez but we're up a creek if the sewage treatment and water plants go down for any length of time.

by delbertpgh

This all reads a little bit useless, or worse. Dreaming of how you'll match up when the apocalypse comes is a cute hobby, but full scale survivalism is an all-consuming passion. Survivalists have a moral system and a politics that is corrosive to good social order. They're nuts, scheming on how much better they'll do when choices are not complicated and everything comes down to life or death.

One thing that's clear about survival after civilizational collapse is that few people will make it as isolated mountain man types. All of the skills and the equipment this guy covers in 43 pages (I pasted it into Word; it's that long) will be good for extending one's life expectancy from a few hours out to a few years, possibly long enough to reproduce, if one's style is to be a family alone in a shack on a ridge. What will be much more typical is that people will bond together and form miniature societies, whose main functions are mutual self-protection and food production, and they will impose rules and order upon their members. It will be immeasurably less free and democratic than American society is now, but that's how the real survivors will survive. Think medieval Europe, thousands of fortified manors centered on serfs, priests, and men-at-arms.

I'd much rather pour my creative energies into making a community that works for more things than raw survival. Like the one I live in right now.

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