Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

Summary

Disaster planning for regular folks Written by lcamtuf@coredump.cx, Dec 2015, minor updates Jul 2021. Buy the book instead! Practical Doomsday is an in-depth, data-packed guide to rational emergency preparedness. The book offers deeper and more polished insights on most of the topics covered on this page. For example, about 40 pages are devoted to financial planning alone - from cash reserves, to insurance policies, to commodity derivatives. You can get it on Amazon, order from Barnes & Noble, or visit your favorite book place. Sample chapter is available here. 1. Introduction [link] The prepper culture begs to be taken with a grain of salt. In the public consciousness, its has all the makings of a doomsday cult: a tribe of unkempt misfits who hoard gold bullion, study herbalism, and preach about the imminent collapse of our society. Today, most of us see such worries as absurd. It's not that life-altering disasters are rare: every year, we hear about millions of people displaced by wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods. Heck, not a decade goes by without at least one first-class democracy lapsing into armed conflict or fiscal disarray. But having grown up in a period of prosperity and calm, we find it difficult to believe that an episode of bad weather or a currency crisis could upend our lives. I suspect that we dismiss such hazards not only because they seem surreal, but also because worrying about them can make one feel helpless and lost. What's more, we tend to follow the same instincts to tune out far more pedestrian and avoidable risks. For example, most of us don't plan ahead for losing a job, for dealing with a week-long water outage, or for surviving the night if our home goes up in smoke. Quite often, our singular strategy for dealing with such dangers is to hope for the government to bail us out. But no matter if our elected officials prefer to school us with passages from Milton Friendman or from Thomas Piketty, the hard truth is that no state c...