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by ben_w 526 days ago
A few days food is a normal kitchen cupboard — singular cupboard, not the whole kitchen.

A few weeks was what I kept ready during the pandemic, just in case I got ill and didn't want to go shopping for a fortnight. Plenty of natural disasters are in that kind of range, even outside the pandemic.

Civilisation collapsing needs a stockpile of about however many months it would take for you to turn your garden into a residential farm and get to harvest season, plus a bit for if that doesn't work… or if raccoons steal in the night everything the ravens didn't steal in the day.
1 comments
PaulDavisThe1st 526 days ago
> Civilisation collapsing needs a stockpile of about however many months it would take for you to turn your garden into a residential farm and get to harvest season, plus a bit for if that doesn't work

So, to coin a phrase:

   how about never? Does never work for you?
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ben_w 526 days ago
Yeah, pretty much.

What I haven't even considered is that although there's a few cases where your immediate community can work together on stuff like this, an actual collapse leads to a power vacuum and breakdown of supply chains, so your immediate community needs to not only be self-sufficient for food but also defence from looting, and yet somehow also not important enough for to the original government to try to keep running, nor for any warlords who spring up in the vacuum to try to pillage, and also not for any foreign powers to peace-keep or annex.

Hmm, I wonder: if the USA suddenly collapsed as hard as the USSR, would Mexico and the Texas region start fighting? Or Cuba and the Florida region?

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